Posts

On-Prem LLM Deployment: Our Cow, Our Milk Who’s to blame? What’s to be done? (classic Russian questions) We’ve been noticing that in our turbulent, multipolar-world-in-the-making era, more and more requests are coming in for on-prem LLM deployments. There are plenty of hidden pitfalls and not much accumulated experience — so let’s try to work through it. — How’s the project going? — We’re in the final stage! — Great, are you wrapping up? — No, we’re looking for someone to blame! ...

Agent Teams: The Commander and His Crew In one of my previous posts I wrote about how our role as IT people is shifting — as we desperately try to stay afloat a little longer before inevitably having to retrain for more practical professions. The question then is: how do we manage agents that, in terms of behavioral patterns, closely resemble the chaotic crew of a rattling jalopy barreling across the steppe? The Commander managed them just fine — so let’s give it a shot ourselves. ...

How Transformers Work: A Plain Explanation Let’s revisit transformers and try to figure out how they actually work — as usual, minimal math and no AI-generated filler. The author makes no claims to absolute truth and may occasionally get things slightly wrong. 1. Let’s Start Simple Let’s refresh our memory on how recurrent networks worked — the ones that “loop back to themselves”. Hard not to think of Hegel’s Absolute Spirit, which travels a path of self-alienation only to return to itself — pure Hegelian recurrence. ...

“Study, Study, and Study Again!” (c) V.I. Lenin Why bother? So here’s the task: build an AI assistant that uses an SLM (Small Language Model) to extract personalized information about the user. Why SLM? Well, privacy — data doesn’t leave the device, plus cost savings. We don’t need the details here — the point is to figure out whether this is even feasible with acceptable quality, what thorns await us, and what to do about it. Let’s go! ...

Agents, Agents Everywhere… Our icons are the prettiest (c) Preface: why bother? As you know, in IT there’s no such thing as “doing nothing.” We call it “researching.” That’s the moment when, barely awake before standup, you frantically try to come up with a justification for yesterday’s idleness in a matter of seconds. But even your research might need some artifacts you can present while insisting you’ve been working on it day and night. Not to mention perfectly pragmatic tasks — exploring new topics and terms to impress people and boost your authority (and hang on to that contract in these grim times). ...