Research and Frontier

Goal: be able to read the field, judge what matters, and know where it’s heading.

This section is deliberately different from the others. It teaches a skill — reading and evaluating inference research — and then applies it to survey the active areas. The specific papers will date; the skill won’t.

Files#

The honest framing#

flowchart LR
  P["1. Paper published"] --> V["2. Independent validation<br/>6-18 months"]
  V --> E["3. Lands in a major engine"]
  E --> F["4. Becomes a config flag"]
  F --> D["5. Becomes the default"]
  P -.->|"most papers stop here"| X["Never changes production"]

  class P neutral
  class V queue
  class E io
  class F compute
  class D memory
  class X warn

Most inference papers do not change production practice.

Of those that do, the pattern is usually:
  1. paper published
  2. 6-18 months of independent validation and engineering
  3. implementation in a major engine
  4. becomes a config flag
  5. becomes the default

PagedAttention took ~12 months from paper to ubiquity.
FlashAttention took ~18 months.
Speculative decoding took ~24 months and is still not universal.
KV eviction methods are 2+ years in and still not production-standard.

→ your job is to identify which papers are on that path, and when
  to pay attention.

File 01 teaches how to make that judgment. Files 02-08 survey the active areas with that lens. Files 09-11 look at where the hardware is going, which determines what will matter next.

How to use this section#

Read file 01 carefully. It’s the transferable skill.

Skim files 02-08 to know what exists. Return to one when you hit its specific problem.

Read files 09-11 once a year. The hardware roadmap determines which software techniques become important.