The Inference Engineering Masterclass — Philip Kiely & Ali Taha, Baseten

We first covered Baseten last year when DeepSeek mania was at peak hype. Now they have raised a monster $13B round and become one of the new cohort of AI Infra decacorns that are (with Nvidia, Intel, and the semis complex) chief beneficiaries of the Inference Inflection. We return to Baseten at the peak of the 2026 edition of Open Weights debate. Ali has published a viral breakdown of Kimi K3:ali@waterloo_internI spent 48 hours with the Kimi K3 modeling code.

It took:

- 650 mg of caffeine (mandatory)

- 40 cans of LaCroix (optional... world record (?))

- 8 papers