Mastering Language Models: From Architecture to Optimization

Maya and Leo open the series with the map: seven stops from the Transformer blueprint to the machinery under massive models, anchored by a three-person startup building an insurance-claims assistant on eight GPUs. They lay out the mental models every LLM expert shares — trust curves, find the bottleneck, separate capability from behavior — then stage the field's cleanest fight on air: bigger models versus more data, from OpenAI's 2020 scaling curves to Chinchilla's flip to the serving-cost era that ran past both camps. Plus trailers for the live attention debate and the alignment fight to come.