Advanced Deep Learning Interview Questions #12 - The Tensor Core Starvation Trap

Applying the chain rule sequentially instead of as batched Jacobian products collapses parallelism and destroys hardware utilization.

You’re in a Senior ML Engineer interview at OpenAI. The interviewer sets a trap:

“Your junior engineer wrote a mathematically flawless backprop loop traversing the network’s influence diagram node-by-node using explicit loops, but training takes weeks. Why must we refactor this sequential graph-traversal into Jacobian matrices for production?”

90% of can…