Curated · Short Answer
Top 25 Short Answer Interview Questions
Here are the top 25 AI interview questions in Short Answer format, sorted by community quality. Each entry links to a detailed answer with explanations, hints, and source-grade follow-ups. See all in this format →
Sorted by community quality · refreshed as new questions are published.
- 01Explain scaled dot-product attention.Short AnswerMedium·Qual 4.8
- 02Design a RAG evaluation harness, what do you measure and how?Short AnswerHard·Qual 4.7
- 03When should you fine-tune instead of using RAG?Short AnswerMedium·Qual 4.6
- 04Explain why transformers replaced RNNs for language modeling.Short AnswerEasy·Qual 4.6
- 05Describe the typical agent execution loop.Short AnswerMedium·Qual 4.4
- 06Why does streaming (SSE) improve perceived latency without changing total decode time?Short AnswerEasy·Qual 4.0
- 07Name a 2026 task where an encoder-decoder transformer still beats a decoder-only LLMShort AnswerEasy·Qual 4.0
- 08Pretraining vs fine-tuning: two key differences in data and objective.Short AnswerEasy·Qual 4.0
- 09Name two situations where Flat brute force search is still the correct production choice in a 2026 vector pipeline.Short AnswerEasy·Qual 4.0Pinecone
- 10A distilled model hits 92% on a public benchmark but 31% on an internal hold-out: diagnose.Short AnswerMedium·Qual 4.0
- 11Same block, two regimes: training parallelism versus inference autoregressionShort AnswerMedium·Qual 4.0
- 12How do you detect catastrophic forgetting after a domain fine-tune?Short AnswerMedium·Qual 4.0
- 13Llama-4 fine-tune shipping to 800M MAU: which license clause must the team re-read?Short AnswerMedium·Qual 4.0
- 14Walk through how a prefix-cache hit changes the work that chunked prefill has to doShort AnswerMedium·Qual 4.0
- 15How is a RAG vector store used as an external long term memory layer inside an agent?Short AnswerMedium·Qual 4.0
- 16Explain when an architecture uses cross-attention vs self-attention. Give concrete examples.Short AnswerMedium·Qual 4.0
- 17How do online (interactive) and offline (batch) inference workloads differ in optimization target?Short AnswerMedium·Qual 4.0
- 18Why are output tokens typically 3-5× more expensive than input tokens?Short AnswerMedium·Qual 4.0AnthropicOpenAI
- 19A production model has no ground-truth labels on live traffic. Design a monitoring plan that catches degradation before users complain.Short AnswerMedium·Qual 4.0
- 20Sketch a Llama 3.1 70B self-host versus hosted-API break-even on the back of an envelopeShort AnswerMedium·Qual 4.0
- 21Three concrete situations where fine-tuning is the wrong toolShort AnswerMedium·Qual 4.0
- 22What is GGUF and how do llama.cpp / mlc-llm enable on-device inference where vLLM cannot run?Short AnswerMedium·Qual 4.0
- 23How does a chain-of-thought judge differ from a direct-score judge, and when is each better?Short AnswerMedium·Qual 4.0
- 24What events must be logged in every agent execution trace for debugging to be tractable?Short AnswerMedium·Qual 4.0Databricks
- 25LoRA vs full FT on 7B + 10k examples: order of magnitude cost comparisonShort AnswerMedium·Qual 4.0
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