Training vs Inference: Are they the same?

Training and inference get lumped together in casual AI conversations, but they behave differently enough that the distinction matters for cost, architecture, and security. In this episode of Pop Goes the Stack, Lori MacVittie, Joel Moses, Ken Arora, and Kevin Baughman (who leads F5’s AI Center of Excellence) unpack what’s truly different, what’s the same, and where people get misled.

Joel makes the “math is the same” case: both phases run similar computations, but training must retain intermediate activations for backpropagation, while inference can discard them. Ken and Kevin pull the…