Block-wise attention forward pass without the full score matrixCodingImplement scaled dot-product attention that processes queries and keys in blocks with a running softmax normalization, so the quadratic score matrix is never materialized…
Hugging Face
A recruiter or hiring manager call, a coding screen with ML or systems depth for some roles, a role-specific take-home on a real open-source problem, a 60-minute review where you defend it, then talks with the team on open-source work and values; no algorithm gauntlet.
- Dense versus mixture-of-experts at fixed computeML designWith a fixed activated-parameter budget, compare a dense model against a mixture-of-experts on training cost, memory, communication, stability, inference and engineering effort…
- KV cache eviction for million-token contextsAI systemDesign an eviction policy for serving very long contexts on limited GPU memory, comparing sliding windows, attention sinks, heavy-hitter eviction, quantization and tiered or…
- Make the case for open-source AI to a skepticBehavioralArgue for open-source AI to someone convinced closed labs have already won: steelman their case, reframe where durable value accrues, and give a personal reason. Reported on…
- Resolve a public split between senior maintainersBehavioralAs a new maintainer facing two senior maintainers publicly split over an architectural change, propose governance that resolves this dispute, prevents repeats, and repairs trust…
- RLHF take-home aligning a small open modelCodingA take-home over a few days: align a small open model with preference data and a parameter-efficient adapter on a single GPU, push the result to the Hugging Face Hub, and write up…
- Ship a breaking API change to a library communityBehavioralDescribe planning a breaking public API migration for a widely used library: how the rollout was staged and how users were carried along. Reported on 1point3acres' Hugging Face…
- Speculative decoding for faster generationCodingImplement speculative decoding: a small draft model proposes tokens and the large model verifies them, accepting matching runs to save forward passes. Reported on 1point3acres'…
- Stand behind an unpopular open-source decisionBehavioralTell about a decision on an open-source project you defended despite community disagreement: how you communicated it and how you later judged it. Reported on 1point3acres' Hugging…
- Web-scale crawl cleaning for pretraining dataSystem designDesign a staged batch pipeline that turns raw web crawl into a deduplicated, quality-filtered, decontaminated pretraining corpus on a fixed cluster and deadline. Reported on…