Top all-time · #3344
Maarten Grootendorst
Personal blog · newsletter.maartengrootendorst.comaiprogramming
Maarten Grootendorst writes Exploring Language Models, a personal blog at newsletter.maartengrootendorst.com about ai and programming. Since 2024, 23 different Hacker News readers have linked it 24 times, most often “A Visual Guide to LLM Quantization”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-29, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (9) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Maarten Grootendorst's visual guides as explainers of how newer AI models work, such as diffusion text models and Gemma's encoder-free multimodal architecture.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 9 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
ML Engineer writing about GenAI | Open Sourcerer (BERTopic, PolyFuzz, KeyBERT) | Author of "Hands-On Large Language Models".
Most-linked posts?
- A Visual Guide to LLM Quantization5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2024-07-23
- A Visual Guide to Mamba and State Space Models4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2024-03-30
- A Visual Guide to Gemma 4 12B4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2026-06-03
- A Visual Guide to DiffusionGemma3 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2026-06-10
- A Visual Guide to Gemma 43 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2026-04-03
- A Visual Guide to LLM Agents2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2025-03-17
What Hacker News says?
This skips over Bag of Words / N-Gram / TF-IDF and many other things, but paints a reasonable picture of the progression. 1. https://jalammar.github.io/illustrated-word2vec/ 2. https://jalammar.github.io/visualizing-neural-machine-transl... 3. https://jalammar.github.io/illustrated-transformer/ 4. https://jalammar.github.io/illustrated-bert/ 5. https://jalammar.github.io/illustrated-gpt2/ And from there it's mostly…
Comment linking /p/a-visual-guide-to-mamba-and-state
on “Harper – an open-source alternative to Grammarly”Submitted A Visual Guide to LLM Quantization as a story · 310 points
HN discussionFor those who are text oriented: https://newsletter.maartengrootendorst.com/p/a-visual-guide-... The paper author has a blog series but I don't think it's for general public https://tridao.me/blog/2024/mamba2-part1-model/
Comment linking /p/a-visual-guide-to-mamba-and-state
on “Codestral Mamba”Submitted A Visual Guide to Reasoning LLMs as a story · 31 points
HN discussionIt's not? There's an mmproj in the GGUFs released by ggml-org: https://huggingface.co/ggml-org/gemma-4-12B-it-GGUF/tree/mai... From the visual guide, there's still the 35M parameter embedder, then the linear projector, for vision, and the linear projector for audio, so it does have some parameters used for the multimodal input to project it into the LLM latent space: https://newsletter.maartengrootendorst.com/p/a-vi…
Comment linking /p/a-visual-guide-to-gemma-4-12b
on “Gemma 4 12B: A unified, encoder-free multimodal model”Submitted A Visual Guide to Quantization - Demystifying the Compression of LLMs as a story · 6 points
HN discussionhttps://newsletter.maartengrootendorst.com/p/a-visual-guide-... (in a link from here: https://developers.googleblog.com/gemma-4-12b-the-developer-... , which was linked in the text of the post, but not the linkdump at the end).
Comment linking /p/a-visual-guide-to-gemma-4-12b
on “Gemma 4 12B: A unified, encoder-free multimodal model”Submitted A Visual Guide to Quantization – Demystifying the Compression of LLMs as a story · 3 points
HN discussionEmbedded within that developer page is a good explainer of the encoder free architecture . https://newsletter.maartengrootendorst.com/p/a-visual-guide-...
Comment linking /p/a-visual-guide-to-gemma-4-12b
on “Gemma 4 12B: A unified, encoder-free multimodal model”Submitted A Visual Guide to LLM Agents as a story · 3 points
HN discussionA good visual explanation of how text diffusion models like DiffusionGemma work: https://newsletter.maartengrootendorst.com/p/a-visual-guide-...
Comment linking /p/a-visual-guide-to-diffusiongemma
on “DiffusionGemma: 4x Faster Text Generation”Submitted A Visual Guide to Mixture of Experts (Moe) LLMs as a story · 3 points
HN discussionJust wanted to share this, I found it was a really nice resource to understand how diffusion Gemma worked: https://newsletter.maartengrootendorst.com/p/a-visual-guide-... The really interesting thing to me was that they didn’t need to train this model from scratch they just used their existing MOE checkpoint: “To convert a decoder-only model (Gemma 4 26B A4B) into a denoiser, we can make use of something it is not d…
Comment linking /p/a-visual-guide-to-diffusiongemma
on “DiffusionGemma Technical Report”Submitted A Visual Guide to Quantization as a story · 3 points
HN discussionThis is amazing and I think will probably end up being a pretty important development. I was just reading this great breakdown of how diffusion Gemma works: https://newsletter.maartengrootendorst.com/p/a-visual-guide-... In reference to the difficulties with applying this to autoregressive LLMs - I wonder if these type of hybrids might be a good candidate for this approach.
Comment linking /p/a-visual-guide-to-diffusiongemma
on “Explorative modeling: Train on the best of K guesses”Submitted A Visual Guide to Mamba and State Space Models as a story · 3 points
HN discussionI've noticed that sometimes the same Claude model will make logical errors sometimes but not other times. Claude's performance is highly temporal. There's even a graph! https://marginlab.ai/trackers/claude-code/ I haven't seen anyone mention this publicly, but I've noticed that the same model will give wildly different results depending on the quantization. 4-bit is not the same as 8-bit and so on in compute require…
Comment linking /p/a-visual-guide-to-quantization
on “I Cancelled Claude: Token Issues, Declining Quality, and Poor Support”Submitted A Visual Guide to Gemma 4 as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted A Visual Guide to Gemma 4 as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted A Visual Guide to Mamba and State Space Models as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted A Visual Guide to DiffusionGemma as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted A Visual Guide to Gemma 4 12B as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted A visual guide to Gemma4 as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted A Visual Guide to LLM Agents as a story · 1 points
HN discussion
