Sarah Chen
Former ML engineer covering AI, machine learning, and data science. Pragmatic over hype.
7 Articles
Machine Translation's Low-Resource Language Problem
There are roughly 7,000 languages spoken on Earth. Google Translate supports about 130 of them. Most commercial MT systems handle fewer than 30 well. If you...
K-Means at Scale: Why It Falls Apart and What's Next
K-means is the algorithm everyone learns in their intro ML course and then uses incorrectly for the rest of their career. It's deceptively simple: pick K...
State Space Models vs Transformers: A Practical Guide
Transformers won't be the only game in town for much longer. I know that sounds like a bold claim — we've all watched the transformer architecture dominate...
How AI Tools Are Quietly Changing the Way Developers Think
I noticed it about six months into using Copilot regularly. I was debugging a Python script and reached for the AI assistant before I'd actually read the error...
LLM Agents Are Just Distributed Systems
The AI community is building multi-agent systems — teams of LLMs that divide work, communicate, and collaborate to solve problems no single model can handle. A...
Beyond Self-Attention: What Comes After Transformers
The transformer architecture has been running AI for eight years now. Every major language model, most image generation systems, and an increasing number of...
Running Large Language Models on Your Own Hardware
Last year I spent $4,200 building a local inference rig that could run a 70B parameter model at reasonable speed. A colleague looked at my setup and asked the...