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Sparse Is Not Cheap by Default: What MoE Efficiency Actually Depends On

TL;DR for operators Sparse mixture-of-experts models can own hundreds of billions—or even a trillion—parameters while activating only a much smaller subset for each token. That makes activated parameters a more relevant starting point than total parameters when comparing computational burden. It does not settle the infrastructure question. The surveyed literature shows that tokens still have to be assigned to experts, overloaded experts need capacity controls, unused capacity can create padding, overflow may result in dropped tokens, and experts distributed across devices require substantial network traffic. Dong Pan and colleagues’ survey brings these model-level and systems-level constraints into one view.1 ...

September 11, 2026 · 8 min · Zelina
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Blame the Blueprint: Why AI Risk Starts in the Architecture

AI risk reviews still tend to begin with comforting questions. Who is the responsible developer? What policy applies? What did the model output? Was the user allowed to ask that? Did the compliance team approve the deployment checklist? Useful questions, certainly. Also slightly late. Two recent arXiv papers point to a less convenient lesson: some AI risks are not merely produced by bad prompts, careless users, malicious deployment, or weak legal controls. They are produced by architecture. One paper shows this at the model-training layer, where Batch Normalization can amplify memorization of atypical samples and increase privacy leakage.1 The other shows it at the ecosystem layer, where decentralized AI can dissolve the very addressee that conventional governance assumes, forcing governance to move from policy instructions to protocol-level constraints.2 ...

May 31, 2026 · 16 min · Zelina
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Memory in the Machine: How SHIMI Makes Decentralized AI Smarter

TL;DR for operators Memory is becoming an operations problem, not just a model feature. Once multiple AI agents maintain local context, update independently, and need to coordinate without a central brain, the usual “throw it into a vector database and pray politely” approach starts to creak. SHIMI, short for Semantic Hierarchical Memory Index, proposes a different memory layer for decentralized agent systems.1 Instead of storing knowledge as a flat set of embedding vectors, it organizes memory as a hierarchy of semantic concepts. Retrieval works by descending from broad concepts to specific entities. Synchronization works by exchanging only the parts of local memory trees that have diverged, using Merkle-DAG summaries, Bloom filters, and CRDT-style merging. ...

April 9, 2025 · 17 min · Zelina