{"podcast":{"title":"Chain of Thought | AI Agents, Infrastructure & Engineering","slug":"chain-of-thought-ai-agents","podcast_index_feed_id":7074333,"rss_url":"https://feeds.transistor.fm/chain-of-thought","website_url":"https://newsletter.chainofthought.show/","image_url":"https://img.transistorcdn.com/Yf0B0akhfAtC-Ahrn6UylfgdusLiIKiLKXlMy29dfwI/rs:fill:0:0:1/w:1400/h:1400/q:60/mb:500000/aHR0cHM6Ly9pbWct/dXBsb2FkLXByb2R1/Y3Rpb24udHJhbnNp/c3Rvci5mbS81YjBh/ODMzMTY3ZjQ0MjBj/YTE1ODMwYTZlNDgx/Mjc2Mi5qcGc.jpg","author":"Conor Bronsdon","episode_count":63,"summary":"AI is reshaping infrastructure, strategy, and entire industries. Host Conor Bronsdon talks to the engineers, founders, and researchers building breakthrough AI systems about what it actually takes to ship AI in production, where the opportunities lie, and how leaders should think about the strategic bets ahead. Chain of Thought translates technical depth into actionable insights for builders and decision-makers. New episodes weekly. Conor Bronsdon is an angel investor in AI and dev tools, Technical Ecosystem Lead at Modular, and previously led growth at AI startups Galileo and LinearB. Disclaimer: All views, opinions and statements expressed on this account are solely my own and are made in my personal capacity. They do not reflect, and should not be construed as reflecting, the views, positions, or policies of Modular. This account is not affiliated with, authorized by, or endorsed by Modular in any way.","last_synced_at":"2026-06-12T00:17:44.387836+00:00","page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/chain-of-thought-ai-agents"},"episode":{"title":"Beyond Transformers: How Liquid AI Is Rethinking LLM Architecture | Maxime Labonne","slug":"beyond-transformers-how-liquid-ai-is-rethinking-llm-architecture-maxime-labonne","published_at":"2025-11-12T10:00:00+00:00","page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/chain-of-thought-ai-agents/beyond-transformers-how-liquid-ai-is-rethinking-llm-architecture-maxime-labonne","show_page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/chain-of-thought-ai-agents","url":"https://share.transistor.fm/s/645ba9fe","audio_url":"https://media.transistor.fm/645ba9fe/50f7edb3.mp3","summary":"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…","meta_description":"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 edg…","key_points":[],"chapters":[],"topics":[],"duration_seconds":3151,"processing_state":"not_requested","actions":[{"name":"request_transcript","method":"POST","url":"https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/chain-of-thought-ai-agents/episodes/beyond-transformers-how-liquid-ai-is-rethinking-llm-architecture-maxime-labonne/transcription-requests","description":"Idempotently request low-priority transcript generation for this episode."},{"name":"read_markdown","method":"GET","url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/chain-of-thought-ai-agents/beyond-transformers-how-liquid-ai-is-rethinking-llm-architecture-maxime-labonne.md","description":"Read the agent-friendly Markdown representation of this episode resource."}]}}