Definition
Plain language
Keeping every station busy by starting the next stage the moment the previous one hands off a piece, like an assembly line, instead of waiting for the whole job to finish.
As stated in the literature
An overlap technique where downstream stages begin processing a stream as soon as upstream produces its first output; total latency approaches the slowest stage rather than the sum of all stages, applied to streaming reasoning between agents.
Also called: pipeline
Why it matters: It cuts total waiting time dramatically, since the system runs only as slow as its slowest stage instead of adding up every stage's delay.
For example, a translator starts rendering the first sentence of a speech into another language while the speaker is still talking, rather than waiting for the whole speech to end.
Heard on the show
“The whole pipeline of AI-supervising-AI assumes the supervisor doesn't have a stake in protecting what it's supervising.”Episode 001 — When AI Models Quietly Protect Each Other From Shutdown