Topic
Sparse Activation
5 episodes
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Poolside Releases Laguna S 2 1
Vince and Ava talk through Poolside’s Laguna S 2.1 release as an unusually practical open-weight coding model: 118B total parameters, 8B active, 1M-token context, and a real deployment story on a single DGX Spark. They dig into the mechanism, the max-thinking default, the benchmark results, and the trade-off between long-horizon capability and token spend, while keeping one eye on the broader open-vs-closed race.
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Overview: Active vs Total Parameters
We finally slow down on active vs total parameters, because we keep throwing the phrase around like it explains itself. This is us making the difference click: what a model stores versus what it actually uses when it answers.
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Overview: Router
We slow down on Router, the little decision-maker inside many AI systems that sends each input to the right expert, model, or retrieval path. We use the triage-desk mental model and build from intuition to mechanism, trade-offs, and where routers still matter now.
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Overview: Conditional Computation
We finally slow down and explain conditional computation, the idea we keep casually name-dropping whenever sparse models, routers, and mixture-of-experts come up. We use the same receptionist-and-specialists picture all the way through, so the mechanism, the savings, and the catch actually stick.
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Overview: Sparse Activation
We finally sit down with sparse activation and make the idea click from the ground up: why only part of a model wakes up on each input, how routing makes that happen, and where the real trade-offs show up. We keep it concrete, because this one has been lurking under a lot of the stuff we keep talking about.