MLEngineering

AI | Data & Analysis | Machine Learning | Tech

Google DeepMind releases DiffusionGemma, an open experimental model that generates full text blocks simultaneously instead of token-by-token, claiming up to 4x faster output on GPUs
ByGlen Rhodes June 10, 2026

DiffusionGemma and the End of Left-to-Right Thinking Google DeepMind dropped something this week that I think is getting undersold in the noise of the usual model release cycle. DiffusionGemma is an open experimental model, and the architecture underneath it is genuinely different from everything else currently in production. Not different in a marketing sense. Different…

Read More Google DeepMind releases DiffusionGemma, an open experimental model that generates full text blocks simultaneously instead of token-by-token, claiming up to 4x faster output on GPUs
AI | Data & Analysis | Machine Learning | Tech

Leopold Aschenbrenner’s contrarian AI infrastructure portfolio strategy and what it means for engineers thinking about the physical constraints of AI
ByGlen Rhodes May 19, 2026

The Bet Behind the Bet: What Leopold Aschenbrenner’s Portfolio Tells Engineers About AI’s Real Constraints Most people covering AI are watching the model benchmarks. Aschenbrenner watched the power grid. That difference in focus is what turned $225 million into roughly $5.5 billion by the end of 2025, and then into $13.67 billion by Q1 2026….

Read More Leopold Aschenbrenner’s contrarian AI infrastructure portfolio strategy and what it means for engineers thinking about the physical constraints of AI
AI | Data & Analysis | Machine Learning | Tech

Insight on the gap between AI demos and production deployments, and why failure mode design matters more than benchmark performance
ByGlen Rhodes May 13, 2026

The Demo Worked Great. The Deployment Did Not. Every few weeks, a new AI agent demo drops and the timeline lights up. Someone ships a polished video, the agent breezes through a 12-step workflow in 90 seconds, and the replies fill with “this changes everything.” I get it. The demos are genuinely impressive sometimes. Then…

Read More Insight on the gap between AI demos and production deployments, and why failure mode design matters more than benchmark performance
AI | Data & Analysis | Machine Learning | Tech

Hot take: rigorous LLM evaluation as a first-class engineering discipline, not an afterthought
ByGlen Rhodes April 29, 2026

LLM Evals Are an Engineering Discipline. Start Treating Them Like One. There’s a moment I’ve seen play out on too many AI teams. The demo works. The vibes are good. Someone says “ship it.” And everything is fine, right up until it isn’t. Users hit edge cases nobody tested. Outputs drift. Trust erodes fast and…

Read More Hot take: rigorous LLM evaluation as a first-class engineering discipline, not an afterthought
AI | Data & Analysis | Machine Learning | Tech

Hot take: inference cost optimization is an architecture problem, not a model selection problem
ByGlen Rhodes April 12, 2026

Inference Cost Is an Architecture Problem Most AI engineers I know have never seriously thought about inference cost until it destroyed their unit economics in production. I’ve watched it happen more times than I’d like to admit. The pattern is always the same: weeks of benchmarking, heated Slack debates about GPT-4o versus Claude versus Gemini,…

Read More Hot take: inference cost optimization is an architecture problem, not a model selection problem
AI | Data & Analysis | Machine Learning | Tech

Hot take: most AI system failures are state management failures, not model failures
ByGlen Rhodes April 10, 2026

The Real Reason Your AI System Is Broken (It’s Not the Model) Every week I watch engineers spend hours debating which model to use. GPT-4o versus Claude 3.5 versus Gemini 1.5 Pro. Benchmark comparisons, pricing calculators, latency tests. It’s not that those things don’t matter. They do, at the margins. But in my experience shipping…

Read More Hot take: most AI system failures are state management failures, not model failures
AI | Data & Analysis | Machine Learning | Tech

Agent orchestration failure modes: silent drift, reconciliation, and the supervision mindset shift
ByGlen Rhodes March 30, 2026

The Failure Mode Nobody Is Logging Most production AI systems don’t fail loudly. They don’t throw exceptions, trigger alerts, or produce obviously wrong outputs. They drift. Quietly, confidently, step by step, until you’re ten downstream tasks deep and the original intent is completely unrecognizable. I’ve been running multi-agent pipelines for over a year, and this…

Read More Agent orchestration failure modes: silent drift, reconciliation, and the supervision mindset shift
AI | Data & Analysis | Machine Learning | Tech

Personal insight: how a humbling AI debugging moment changed Glen’s engineering workflow and what the real skill shift looks like
ByGlen Rhodes March 28, 2026

Three Hours vs. Two Minutes I’ve been building ML systems long enough to have opinions about most things. Distributed training, gradient accumulation bugs, flaky data pipelines. I’ve seen enough failure modes that I stopped being surprised by them. Then I spent three hours staring at a distributed training failure last month and came up completely…

Read More Personal insight: how a humbling AI debugging moment changed Glen’s engineering workflow and what the real skill shift looks like
AI | Data & Analysis | Machine Learning | Tech

Most AI Browser Agents Are Blind: The Case for Programmatic Control
ByGlen Rhodes March 27, 2026

Most AI agents are blind. They see screenshots. They guess at selectors. They retry five times when a button moves two pixels. That is not a browser. That is a blindfolded person poking at a touchscreen. The dev-browser approach changes the mental model entirely. Instead of giving an AI agent a camera pointed at Chrome,…

Read More Most AI Browser Agents Are Blind: The Case for Programmatic Control
AI | Data & Analysis | Machine Learning | Tech

TeamPCP supply chain attack compromising LiteLLM, Trivy, and five package ecosystems targeting AI API credentials
ByGlen Rhodes March 25, 2026

The Supply Chain Attack Nobody Is Talking About Enough Everyone is watching Optimus videos this week. I get it. The robot stuff is genuinely impressive. But I keep coming back to something far more unsettling, something that directly affects every team shipping AI products right now. TeamPCP just ran a multi-stage supply chain attack across…

Read More TeamPCP supply chain attack compromising LiteLLM, Trivy, and five package ecosystems targeting AI API credentials