Machine Learning Street Talk · Wednesday, September 2, 2026
Neil Nanda discusses 'intentional design' for foundation models, suggesting a move beyond a binary choice between traditional programming and current models. The goal is to create a spectrum where developers have more engineering control, allowing them to specify what a model should learn and, crucially, what it should not.
“You added quite a nice piece actually in your intentional design blog where you were saying that there's almost a spectrum of possibilities, right?”
“Um, you know, you either write a program like it's the Stone Age. Or you go to a model to do it. And that model will have been trained like it just gets whatever it gets from its training process.”
“We want to be able to have this sort of spectrum where you can choose, you have more like engineering ability in in the model creation process.”
“So you can say like, you know, I want to learn this, but not that.”