The author does not deeply mention that quality/intelligence is a third dimension here in addition to throughput and latency, and the frontier is jagged so quality and intelligence require bespoke benchmarks to evaluate tradeoffs for speed and cost.
this is a nice and concise writeup. what's striking to me is that these techniques really have not changed in /years/. sure, precision has become slightly lower, spec decoding acceptance has gotten slightly better and the complexity of parallelism is trickier with mixture of experts. but no new concepts in a very long time!
the absolute most impactful improvements for inference comes at architecture design time. I firmly believe everyone who cares about impacting model efficiency should look there
the absolute most impactful improvements for inference comes at architecture design time. I firmly believe everyone who cares about impacting model efficiency should look there
But overall yes the fundamentals of LLM performance optimization have been remarkably stable over the last few years.