Zach Garner : AI Systems Architect
Work Writing About Contact
ZG

I build & deploy
high-scale, production
Artificial Intelligence.

From training pipelines to production agents. Two decades of machine learning, distributed systems, and technical leadership.

Anyscale
Field Engineer
Ray & Distributed AI
Large-Scale AI
Distributed Computing & AI
Since 2004
Field Engineering
Customer-Facing
Technical Delivery
Production ML
Training & Deployment
Scaling & Eval
Coaching
Co-Active Certified
400+ Hours
Topics
Physical AI / Distributed Training / LLM Fine-Tuning / Scaling / Agents
Essays & Briefs
VLA Evolution: Fixed Skills to Reasoning Agents in Two Years / VLAs Replace Custom Robotics Pipelines With Pretrained Foundation Models / pi0 Proves Robotic Foundation Models Follow the LLM Recipe / The SaaS Collapse Hits Developer Tools First / The Agent Infrastructure Gap / The VLA Data Bottleneck / The Anatomy of a Customer Engagement / The Pieces of a Training Run / What Happens to Your Data Pipeline at Scale / The Agent Infrastructure Nobody Talks About / How the Physical AI Stack Evolved
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Deep Dives

Fine-Tuning VLAs at Scale

A 5-Part Series on Physical AI

VLAs go straight from camera input to motor control. One model, no perception stack, no hand-coded planner. But the training infrastructure that worked for LLMs doesn't transfer.

This series covers what's different and what to build - from data pipelines through evaluation.

1The Data ProblemHeterogeneous data breaks standard pipelines 2Decoupling CPU and GPU ScalingWhy vertical scaling makes it worse 3Distributed Data LoadingStreaming, sharding, and shuffle strategies 4Training Loop OptimizationProfiling before you guess 5Evaluation at ScaleOffline metrics vs real-world performance

Background

Twenty years building AI systems - from early computer vision and machine learning through the current wave of LLMs and autonomous agents.

Current Work

Field engineer at Anyscale, the company behind Ray - working with robotics and autonomous vehicle teams on production AI infrastructure.

Consulting & Coaching

Independent AI consulting and Co-Active certified coaching for technical leaders and engineering teams.

Let's build together

I advise teams, consult on AI infrastructure, and regularly connect with engineers building at scale.

Reach out
ZG