Generative Vision Interview Questions, issue 24, Jul 3, 2026
The Trajectory Curvature Trap
Research Engineer interview at Google DeepMind, and the interviewer asks:
“Your 1000-step diffusion teacher is too slow for production, so you distill it into a single-step student. The output is garbage. You swap in a bigger student. Still garbage. What’s actually broken?”
Don’t say: “The student doesn’t have enough capacity.”
When one-step distillation fails, model size isn't your bottleneck, it's the hidden complexity of the ODE path, and how constant-difficulty sub-problems actually solve it.
The full answer, with the mechanism and the arithmetic, is for paid subscribers on Substack.