Glossary #
Short definitional articles on the technical concepts that come up most often in my work. Each one stands alone, but they cross-reference. Cited where claims are non-obvious.
Economics and frameworks #
- Verification economics. The framework that treats cost-per-correct-answer as the operational unit of LLM inference in 2026, replacing cost-per-token. The Cost-correct decomposition with reasoning-multiplier and verification-accept-rate terms.
Inference and runtime #
- AWQ quantization. Activation-Aware Weight Quantization, the dominant production path for INT4 LLM serving in 2026.
- Speculative decoding. The runtime trick that turns small draft models into 2 to 3x throughput gains for large target models.
Architecture #
- Mamba and state-space models. The non-attention sequence backbone that made hybrid LLMs the 2025 to 2026 production frontier.
Edge and embedded #
- GPS-denied navigation. Drone autonomy without GPS. What it actually requires and where edge AI fits.
- Edge AI silicon: CV5 vs Jetson vs Hexagon. Field comparison of Ambarella CV5, Nvidia Jetson AGX Orin and Thor, and Qualcomm Hexagon for drones, robotics, and on-device inference.