#quantisation

A phone lying opened on an anti-static mat with its battery pouch and copper SoC shield can exposed, the shield lifted part-way off the chip, and a full-height datacentre accelerator card standing on the bench behind

The Deployment Envelope: Small Models Where the Power Is Not

A datacentre gives a model whatever it asks for. A device gives it a fixed envelope — memory, bandwidth, a sustained thermal budget, a battery — and a model has to be built to live inside it, not merely shrunk until it fits.

By Brecht Corbeel · August 8, 2026 · 20 min read

One master pattern on a bench with three different moulds set out around it — a sand flask, an investment shell, and a steel die — with the sand flask caught mid-closing

Foundation Models

Dense, Sparse, and Distilled: Comparing Approaches to Frontier Model Capacity

Three ways of getting more capability into a servable model, each with a different cost profile, a different failure mode, and a different answer to the question of what a parameter is for.

By Brecht Corbeel · August 8, 2026 · 11 min read

Browse by Category

Surprise me →

All AI Hardware & Semiconductors 100 AI Agents & Systems 33 Foundation Models 27 Model Evaluation 15 AI Industry 9 Edge AI & Electronics 7 AI Safety 7 AI Research 7 Open Models 6 AI Infrastructure 5 Industry Analysis 2 Datacenters & Infrastructure 2 Writing & Information 1 Structural Biology 1 Small & Edge Models 1 Semiconductor Markets 1 Security & Technology 1 Security 1 Scientific Revolution 1 Robotics & Embodied AI 1 Quantum Information 1 Planetary Science 1 Physics 1 Particle Physics 1 Origins & Astrobiology 1 Open-Weight Models 1 Neuroscience 1 Metrology 1 Mathematics & Computation 1 Materials Science 1 Labour & Technology 1 Interpretability 1 Institutions & State Capacity 1 Institutions & Economy 1 Inference Economics 1 Industrial Revolutions 1 Humanity & Technology 1 History of Technology 1 History of Computing 1 Governance & Policy 1 Evolution & Ecology 1 Ethics of Technology 1 Energy & Civilization 1 Earth & Climate 1 Demography & Urbanization 1 Data & Training 1 Cumulative Culture 1 Cosmology 1 Condensed Matter 1 Chemistry & Catalysis 1 Alignment & Safety 1 Agriculture & Cities 1 Agent Evaluation 1 AI Security 1 AI & The Web 1