LLM Agents Interview Questions, issue 5, Feb 26, 2026
The Test-Time Compute Trap
Senior AI Engineer interview at Google DeepMind, and the interviewer asks:
“Your zero-shot LLM keeps failing on Olympiad-level formal proofs because the reasoning depth is too vast. You have 10,000 A100 hours of inference budget to burn. Instead of naively sampling full proofs 100 times, what multi-stage decomposition strategy do you implement?”
If you burn inference budget on full formal trajectories, you amplify low-level syntax entropy instead of decomposing the proof search along logical hierarchies.
The full answer, with the mechanism and the arithmetic, is for paid subscribers on Substack.