LLM System Design Interview, issue 18, Nov 15, 2025
The Throughput–Latency Paradox
Senior ML Engineer interview at Anthropic, and the interviewer asks:
“Our ops team wants to 8x our batch size to cut costs and improve throughput. Why is this a dangerous move for user experience, and at what point does this strategy stop making sense... before you run out of memory?”
The hidden hump where bigger batches stop saving money and start destroying user experience.
The full answer, with the mechanism and the arithmetic, is for paid subscribers on Substack.