# Beyond Transformers: How Liquid AI Is Rethinking LLM Architecture | Maxime Labonne

Page: https://stenobird.com/podcast/chain-of-thought-ai-agents/beyond-transformers-how-liquid-ai-is-rethinking-llm-architecture-maxime-labonne
Text version: https://stenobird.com/podcast/chain-of-thought-ai-agents/beyond-transformers-how-liquid-ai-is-rethinking-llm-architecture-maxime-labonne.md
Podcast: [Chain of Thought | AI Agents, Infrastructure & Engineering](https://stenobird.com/podcast/chain-of-thought-ai-agents)
Published: 2025-11-12T10:00:00+00:00
Episode link: https://share.transistor.fm/s/645ba9fe
Audio file: https://media.transistor.fm/645ba9fe/50f7edb3.mp3
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JSON: https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/chain-of-thought-ai-agents/episodes/beyond-transformers-how-liquid-ai-is-rethinking-llm-architecture-maxime-labonne
Duration seconds: 3151

## Resource

The transformer architecture has dominated AI since 2017, but it’s not the only approach to building LLMs - and new architectures are bringing LLMs to edge devicesMaxime Labonne, Head of Post-Training at Liquid AI and creator of the 67,000+ star LLM Course, joins Conor Bronsdon to challenge the AI architecture status quo. Liquid AI’s hybrid architecture, combining transformers with convolutional layers, delivers faster inference, lower latency, and dramatically smaller footprints without sacrificing capability. This alternative architectural philosophy creates models that run effectively on phones and laptops without compromise.But reimagined architecture is only half the story. Maxime unpacks the post-training reality most teams struggle with: challenges and opportunities of synthetic data, how to balance helpfulness against safety, Liquid AI’s approach to evals, RAG architectural approaches, how he sees AI on edge devices evolving, hard won lessons from shipping LFM1 through 2, and much more. If you're tired of surface-level AI takes and want to understand the architectural and engineering decisions behind production LLMs from someone building them in the trenches, this is your episode.Connect with ⁨Maxime Labonne⁩ :LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/maxime-labonne/ X (Twitter) – @maximelabonneAbout Maxime – https://mlabonne.github.io/blog/about.html HuggingFace – https://huggingface.co/mlabonne The LLM Course – https://github.com/mlabonne/llm-course Liquid AI – https://liquid.ai Connect with ⁨Conor Bronsdon⁩ :X (twitter) – @conorbronsdonSubstack – https://conorbronsdon.substack.com/ LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/conorbronsdon/00:00 Intro — Welcome to Chain of Thought 00:27 Guest Intro — Maxime Labonne of Liquid AI 02:21 The Hybrid LLM Architecture Expla…

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