AI Engineer World's Fair 2026 — unofficial import demo

Bio

Asaf Gardin is a Senior Software Engineer on the inference team at AI21 Labs, where he works on high-performance LLM inference and the production deployment of the Jamba hybrid SSM-Transformer models. He's an active vLLM committer, contributing to quantization, scheduling, and support for Mamba-based architectures. His talk covers two production bugs in vLLM's Mamba support - a scheduler edge case that corrupted SSM state under memory pressure, and a 32-bit integer overflow in a CUDA kernel that surfaced as RL training instability - both root-caused at AI21 and fixed upstream. He also built Kernel Academy, a browser-based tutorial for learning Triton GPU programming. Previously at IBM.

Sessions

• Two Bugs That Hid in Plain Sight: A vLLM Debugging Detective StoryThursday, July 2 · 3:20 PM – 3:40 PM · Track 9Inference