Advanced NLP Interview Questions #24 – The Confidence Calibration Trap
Why model cascades fail not on routing logic, but on overconfident cheap models that never escalate.
You’re in a Senior AI Engineer interview at Anthropic. The interviewer leans in and asks:
“We’re bleeding money on inference. We want to build a 𝐌𝐨𝐝𝐞𝐥 𝐂𝐚𝐬𝐜𝐚𝐝𝐞 (𝐅𝐫𝐮𝐠𝐚𝐥𝐆𝐏𝐓) system, route easy queries to Llama-7B, and only send the hard stuff to GPT-4. What is the actual engineering bottleneck that makes this unreliable in production?”
D…
