Napkin Math for AI: A Practical Trick to Diagnose Inference Bottlenecks
HamelHusain · x · 2026-08-12
The author recommends that AI engineers learn the trick of "napkin math" for model training and inference—using quick mathematical approximations to estimate computational workloads.
Mastering this skill helps developers rapidly diagnose performance slowdowns in practice, reason about new techniques (like the speedup from speculative decoding or model framerates at various resolutions), and potentially invent and validate their own novel technical approaches.
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