1/6: Many people ask me in DMs what YC startups actually ask in interviews
I've given a lot of these startup interviews now, even worked with a YC startups myself, so let me tell you what I've actually seen:
If your RAG pipeline is inaccurate, what should you do?
This is a real interview question from a big tech company.
The video explains the answer in ~7 minutes.
00:00 How to improve a RAG pipeline?
00:30 Diagnosing retrieval problems
03:20 Where vector similarity falls short
05:56 Latency, cost, and accuracy trade-offs
06:45 Bloopers
Want your interview questions answered? Post them here: https://t.co/s1KP41qi0s
AI engineering program for software engineers: https://t.co/lsqvTnoxvE
#LLMs #AI #InterviewReady
15 AI Research Voices on X
@amaarora= AI papers explained through code.
@cwolferesearch= Clear, in-depth LLM research breakdowns.
@sedielem= Diffusion models explained deeply.
@MaartenGr= Complex AI made visual.
@seb_ruder= NLP and multilingual AI insights.
@Tim_Dettmers= Quantization and efficient LLMs demystified.
@arankomatsuzaki= Research papers distilled into takeaways.
@srush_nlp= Transformers explained with hands-on code.
@ai_explorer25= New AI tools, peoples and ai commentary
@rasbt= LLM research translated into practical code.
@natolambert= RLHF and post-training unpacked.
@eugeneyan= AI research meets real-world systems.
@sh_reya= AI evaluation beyond benchmark scores.
@HamelHusain= Practical, no-nonsense AI evaluation.
@ch402= Neural networks decoded from within.
Met a guy who got a $750,000 offer from Anthropic
I asked him how he broke into AI so fast
He sent me the exact video that got him in. Andrej Karpathy's 3.5 hour deep dive into LLMs
You won't find anything better about how LLMs work than this video
I watched it last night
Halfway through, I realized I have been using AI completely wrong for years
Bookmark this.
AI engineering interview in 2026.
How many of these can you explain clearly:
KV cache
Prompt caching
Semantic caching
Speculative decoding
Context window vs effective context
Hybrid search (BM25 + vectors)
Reranking
Structured outputs
Tool calling
LLM-as-a-judge
Eval sets
Guardrails
Prompt injection
Token budgets
Model routing
If it's less than 8, you're not ready.
If it's 15, you're probably the one taking the interview.