Definition
Plain language
The part of a system that turns an internal representation back into something usable, like words, an image, or a robot action.
As stated in the literature
A module that maps a model's latent representation to a target output modality; in Orca, thin per-modality decoders read one shared world-state latent out as text, image, or action.
Also called: decoders
Why it matters: It lets a single shared internal representation power many different outputs, so the hard learning is done once and reused across text, images, and actions.
For example, the same internal understanding of a scene can be sent through one decoder to describe it in words and another to draw it as a picture.
Heard on the show
“And each of them is shaped by what's *common*: dense decoder-only transformers, NVIDIA GPUs, generic chat workloads.”Episode 027 — When AI Agents Build the Serving Stack: A Bet on Bespoke Infrastructure