Yun Wu

Learning GenAI via SOTA Papers

This podcast is focusing on sharing the papers on GenAI related topic, especially the SOTA (State of the Art) papers that are the foundations of GenAI work. It shows how these researches paved the way to the GenAI tools that we are using every day such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude Code etc.

Author

Yun Wu

Category

Technology

Podcast website

podcasters.spotify.com

Latest episode

Jul 10, 2026

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Episodes

EP074: How Gemini Beat Human Experts 28.02.2026

The paper introduces Gemini, a new family of natively multimodal models developed by Google, designed to seamlessly understand and reason across text, image, audio, and video. The Gemini 1.0 family is built to accommodate different computational limitations and is released in three sizes: Ultra for highly complex reasoning tasks, Pro for efficient deployability at scale, and Nano for on-device app...

EP073: Mixtral 8x7B Sparse Experts Beat Giants 28.02.2026

The paper introduces Mixtral 8x7B , a Sparse Mixture of Experts (SMoE) language model developed by Mistral AI and released under the open-source Apache 2.0 license. Key Highlights: Architecture and Efficiency: Mixtral 8x7B uses a decoder-only transformer architecture where each layer consists of 8 distinct feedforward blocks, or "experts". For every token at each layer, a routing network...

EP072: Mamba Solves The Transformer's Fatal Flaw 28.02.2026

" Mamba: Linear-Time Sequence Modeling with Selective State Spaces " introduces a novel architecture designed to replace Transformers as the backbone of foundation models by addressing their computational inefficiency on long sequences. While prior efficient architectures (like linear attention and structured state space models) scaled better, they struggled to match Transformer performa...

EP071: How Zephyr-7B Beat Llama-70B 28.02.2026

Here is a short summary of the paper " ZEPHYR: Direct Distillation of LM Alignment " : The Problem: While smaller, open-source large language models (LLMs) have significantly improved in accuracy using distilled supervised fine-tuning (dSFT), they often struggle with "intent alignment". This means they do not behave in a way that aligns with human preferences or respond well to...

EP070: Mistral 7B Beats Llama 2 13B 28.02.2026

Mistral 7B is a 7-billion-parameter language model designed to deliver high-level performance while maintaining efficient and cost-effective inference. Released under the open-source Apache 2.0 license, the model achieves state-of-the-art results for its size, outperforming the larger Llama 2 13B model across all tested benchmarks and surpassing Llama 1 34B in reasoning, mathematics, and code gene...

EP069: Alibaba's Qwen Specialized Models Beat Generalists 28.02.2026

The provided paper introduces QWEN , a comprehensive series of large language models (LLMs) developed by Alibaba Group. Here is a short summary of its key highlights: Model Lineage : The QWEN series includes base pretrained language models—trained on up to 3 trillion tokens of diverse, multilingual text and code—and QWEN-CHAT models, which are aligned to human preferences using supervised fine-tun...

EP068: vLLM Fixes the KV Cache Bottleneck 28.02.2026

Efficient Memory Management for Large Language Model Serving with PagedAttention addresses the memory bottlenecks associated with serving Large Language Models (LLMs). Here is a short summary of the paper's core concepts: The Problem: High-throughput LLM serving requires batching multiple requests, but this process is heavily bottlenecked by the Key-Value (KV) cache. The KV cache is dynamic, m...

EP067: FlashAttention-2 Unlocks Massive Context Windows 28.02.2026

Here is a short summary of the paper FlashAttention-2: Faster Attention with Better Parallelism and Work Partitioning : The Problem: Scaling Transformers to handle longer sequences is limited by the attention layer, which has quadratic runtime and memory costs. While the original FlashAttention algorithm significantly improved memory usage and speed, it remained inefficient compared to optimized m...

EP066: Llama 2 Ghost Attention And Safety Secrets 28.02.2026

The paper introduces Llama 2 , a family of pretrained and fine-tuned large language models (LLMs) developed by Meta, ranging in scale from 7 billion to 70 billion parameters. Here are the key highlights from the paper: Pretraining Improvements: Llama 2 was pretrained on 2 trillion tokens from a new mix of publicly available data. Compared to its predecessor (Llama 1), Llama 2 features a 40% larger...

EP065: Teaching Small AI To Think Like Giants 28.02.2026

The paper introduces Orca , a 13-billion parameter language model developed by Microsoft Research that significantly improves the reasoning and comprehension abilities of smaller models. Previous instruction-tuned models (like Vicuna or Alpaca) often struggle because they learn to mimic the style of Large Foundation Models (LFMs) without grasping their underlying reasoning processes. To solve this...

EP064: Synthetic Textbooks Break AI Scaling Laws 28.02.2026

The paper "T extbooks Are All You Need " introduces phi-1 , a new Large Language Model (LLM) for code generation that demonstrates the profound impact of data quality on model performance. By focusing on highly curated data, the authors show that it is possible to break traditional scaling laws and achieve state-of-the-art results with a significantly smaller model and training dataset....

EP063: RWKV Smashes the Transformer Memory Ceiling 28.02.2026

The paper " RWKV: Reinventing RNNs for the Transformer Era " introduces a novel neural network architecture called Receptance Weighted Key Value (RWKV) , which is designed to combine the best features of both Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) and Transformers. While traditional Transformers have revolutionized natural language processing, they suffer from computational and memory complexi...

EP062: VOYAGER AI Masters Minecraft by Writing Code 28.02.2026

The paper introduces VOYAGER , the first Large Language Model (LLM)-powered embodied lifelong learning agent designed to continuously explore, acquire diverse skills, and make new discoveries in the open-ended world of Minecraft without human intervention. By interacting with GPT-4 through blackbox queries, VOYAGER completely bypasses the need for explicit gradient-based training or model paramete...

EP061: Fine-Tuning LLaMA 65B on One GPU 28.02.2026

QLoRA: Efficient Finetuning of Quantized LLMs presents a highly efficient approach that drastically reduces the memory required to finetune large language models. By backpropagating gradients through a frozen, 4-bit quantized pretrained model into Low Rank Adapters (LoRA), QLoRA makes it possible to finetune a 65-billion parameter model on a single 48GB GPU while preserving full 16-bit task perfor...

EP060: Direct Preference Optimization Replaces RLHF 27.02.2026

The paper " Direct Preference Optimization: Your Language Model is Secretly a Reward Model " introduces a streamlined and highly effective method for aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences, offering a simpler alternative to traditional Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF). The Problem with Traditional RLHF Standard RLHF pipelines are complex, computatio...

EP059: Tree of Thoughts Unlocks System 2 Thinking 27.02.2026

The paper introduces " Tree of Thoughts " (ToT) , a novel framework designed to enhance the general problem-solving capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). Traditionally, LLMs generate text through a left-to-right, token-level decision-making process, which is similar to fast, automatic "System 1" human cognition. This standard mechanism often falls short in complex tasks that require strate...

EP058: Inside the Autonomous AI Town of Smallville 27.02.2026

The paper " Generative Agents: Interactive Simulacra of Human Behavior " introduces "generative agents," which are computational software agents designed to simulate believable human behavior. To demonstrate their capabilities, researchers populated a sandbox environment reminiscent of The Sims with twenty-five unique agents who can plan their days, share news, form relationshi...

EP057: Blind GPT-4 Taught LLaVA To See 27.02.2026

The provided text introduces LLaVA , an innovative large multimodal model designed to function as a general-purpose assistant by merging vision and language . By connecting a pre-trained CLIP visual encoder with a large language model through a simple projection layer, the system can follow complex instructions related to images. The authors utilize instruction-tuning with data generated by GPT-4...

EP056: Pythia Turns AI Alchemy Into Chemistry 27.02.2026

The Pythia project introduces a suite of sixteen large language models designed specifically to facilitate scientific research into the training dynamics of AI. By providing open access to 154 intermediate checkpoints and the exact data ordering used during development, the creators enable a level of transparency rarely seen in proprietary systems. Their research demonstrates that memorization occ...

EP055: Can GPT-4 Fairly Judge Other AI 27.02.2026

Here is a short summary of the paper " Judging LLM-as-a-Judge with MT-Bench and Chatbot Arena " : The Core Problem Evaluating large language model (LLM) based chat assistants is difficult because their capabilities are broad, and traditional benchmarks (like MMLU) often fail to capture actual human preferences in open-ended, multi-turn conversations. The Proposed Solution To address this...

EP054: Alpaca - Stanford Built a $600 GPT Clone 27.02.2026

Alpaca is a 7-billion-parameter instruction-following language model developed by researchers at Stanford CRFM. It was created by fine-tuning Meta's LLaMA 7B model on 52,000 instruction-following demonstrations. These demonstrations were automatically generated using OpenAI's text-davinci-003 via a simplified "self-instruct" method, which cost less than $500 to produce. The fine-tuning process too...

EP053: Sparks of AGI in Early GPT-4 27.02.2026

The paper " Sparks of Artificial General Intelligence: Early experiments with GPT-4 " presents an in-depth investigation of an early version of OpenAI's GPT-4, arguing that it represents a significant step toward Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). The authors contend that GPT-4 goes far beyond simple language prediction, exhibiting broad, near-human-level performance across a wid...

EP052: GPT-4 Bar Exam and Visual Reasoning 27.02.2026

GPT-4 is a large-scale, multimodal model developed by OpenAI capable of processing both text and image inputs to generate text outputs. Here is a short summary of its key aspects based on the technical report: Capabilities and Performance: GPT-4 exhibits human-level performance on a wide variety of professional and academic benchmarks. Most notably, it passed a simulated bar exam with a score in t...

EP051: ControlNet Solves Spatial Control With Zero Convolutions 27.02.2026

The provided paper introduces ControlNet , an end-to-end neural network architecture designed to add fine-grained spatial conditioning controls to large, pretrained text-to-image diffusion models, such as Stable Diffusion. Here is a brief summary of the paper's key points: The Core Mechanism: ControlNet works by freezing (locking) the parameters of the original, production-ready diffusion mode...

EP050: How Meta's LLaMA Beat GPT-3 27.02.2026

The paper introduces LLaMA , a collection of foundation language models ranging from 7 billion to 65 billion parameters developed by Meta AI. A major contribution of this work is its demonstration that state-of-the-art models can be trained exclusively using publicly available datasets, such as CommonCrawl, Wikipedia, and arXiv. This contrasts with most existing large language models (LLMs) that r...

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