AI Interview Prep

AI Interview Prep

LLM System Design Interview #23 - The Mantissa Trap

Why casting everything to bfloat16 silently freezes your model, and which FP32 states are non-negotiable for stable training.

Hao Hoang's avatar
Hao Hoang
Nov 21, 2025
∙ Paid

You’re in a ML Engineer interview at OpenAI and the interviewer asks:

“Your team is hitting OOM errors. An intern engineer proposes casting the entire model and optimizer state to bfloat16 to cut memory usage by 50%. Why is this a ticking time bomb that will cause training to go out of control, and what components must stay in FP32?”

Most candidates say:

“…

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