Reiner Pope – The math behind how LLMs are trained and served

About this episode

Reiner Pope explains the mathematics behind training and serving large language models in a technical blackboard lecture format.

Did a very different format with Reiner Pope - a blackboard lecture where he walks through how frontier LLMs are trained and served. It’s shocking how much you can deduce about what the labs are doing from a handful of equations, public API prices, and some chalk. It’s a bit technical, but I encourage you to hang in there – it’s really worth it. There are less than a handful of people who understand the full stack of AI, from chip design to model architecture, as well as Reiner. It was a real delight to learn from him. Recommend watching this one on YouTube so you can see the chalkboard. Reiner is CEO of MatX , a new chip startup (full disclosure - I’m an angel investor). He was previously at Google, where he worked on software efficiency , compilers, and TPU architecture. Download markdown of transcript here to chat with an LLM. Wrote up some flashcards and practice problems to help myself retain what Reiner taught. Hope it's helpful to you too! Sponsors * Jane Street needs constant access to incredibly low-latency compute. I recently asked one of their engineers, Clark, to talk me through how they meet these demands. Our conversation—which touched on everything from FPGAs to…

People in this episode

Host: Dwarkesh Patel

Guest: Reiner Pope

Topics covered

• LLMs
• AI training
• chip design
• model architecture
• technical lecture

Keywords

• LLMs
• AI
• training
• Reiner Pope
• MatX
• Google
• Jane Street
• Gemma 4

Sponsors

Jane Street

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: MatX, Google

Products: Gemma 4

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