performance
Applied AI interview questions tagged performance, across every topic.
5 questions · 2 unlocked for you
Concepts behind "performance"
The curriculum that explains the ideas these questions test.
Foundational
Latency Budgets and StreamingLLM latency is not one number: time-to-first-token (set by prefill and queueing) and inter-token latency (set by decode) feel very different to users. Streaming tokens as they generate hides total latency by showing progress immediately. Designing to a latency budget means allocating time across retrieval, model, and tools, measuring TTFT and tokens-per-second (not just end-to-end), and using streaming, caching, and routing to hit it. Applied-AI interviews probe it because perceived latency makes or breaks LLM UX.⚙️ System Design for AI in Production
Foundational
The Big-O That Actually MattersBig-O complexity matters most where it bites in real AI systems: avoid accidental O(n^2) (all-pairs comparisons, repeated linear scans), use hash maps for O(1) lookups, and know that vector search is approximate precisely because exact nearest-neighbor is O(n) per query. The practical skill is spotting the quadratic trap and the data-structure fix, not reciting complexity classes. Applied-AI interviews probe it because the difference between O(n) and O(n^2) is the difference between a system that scales and one that falls over.💻 Coding & Engineering Craft