A visual guide with 50+ diagrams demystifies Mixture of Experts in modern LLMs
techNmak · x · 2026-09-04
Maarten Grootendorst's "A Visual Guide to Mixture of Experts (MoE)" uses 50+ visualizations to explain MoE's two core components:
- Experts: each FFNN layer holds a set of expert sub-models, a subset of which is activated; experts specialize at the token/syntax level, not by domain like "psychology" or "biology."
- Router/gate network: decides which tokens go to which experts.
The guide also covers sparse activation, token routing and load balancing, making it one of the best entry points for understanding why so many LLMs adopt MoE.
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