What about 15k tokens per second? [0] I remember looking at this earlier in the year and it being so fast that it feels fake. And, yes, this model is old - but still awesome for what it is.
But it’s irrelevant. 750 tokens/s on a full frontier model is useful. 15000 poor quality tokens is much less useful no matter how much scaffolding you put around it.
You are missing the point. This is a technology demonstration on prototype hardware, and no one intends it to be seriously useful.
Their architecture has fundamental speed and efficiency advantages over GPUs or Cerebras. They expect to scale up to real LLMs by splitting a model layer-wise across several chips, which they can do without incurring any throughput penalty.
> They expect to scale up to real LLMs by splitting a model layer-wise across several chips, which they can do without incurring any throughput penalty.
I’ll patiently wait to see this in reality. Their demonstration hardware is a 250W chip that is enormous in die area for the model size. They’re making a lot of claims, but until they can deliver then it’s nearly vaporware in my view.
I’d be happy to be proven wrong, but I think they’re going to quickly run into hardware realities quite soon if they think they can just chain a bunch of chips together to achieve the same performance on larger sizes.
Why can't they do it? Jim Keller's company is also taking a different approach [0].
The simple fact that we think what we have now is scalable is basically what you are saying can't be done: " just chain a bunch of chips together to achieve the same performance on larger sizes". How do you think current architectures work? And what is being used today is all proprietary to one company!
Actually it's the opposite. Per mm of silicon it's massively less efficient and making enough chips and powering them is a major bottleneck right now. Worse, scaling to larger models requires more of our absolute best quality silicon manufacturing, where e.g. an H200 mostly just needs more memory.
But I’m not missing the point. If you can run one frontier model at 750t/s, then you can probably run many many instances of an SLM in parallel at a rate that exceeds 15k/s. That’s kinda the point of the flash or ultrafast variants. And they’re on something much more modern than llama3.1.
Yes, you are missing the point. 1) It's a demo. [0] 2) It hasn't been updated for 4+ months.
You don't need LLMs for everything. That is 100% the point. You can burn down the world with all of your frontier LLMs that are being used for simple queries OR we can do something faster and more efficient like this. Just because you can run a SotA model at "fast" speeds, again, severely misses the point.
And no, you can't run anything from Anthropic or OAI on-prem, so until you can there's really no comparison. If people want to continue down the path of gate-kept models with no other options then we'll all follow you off the cliff.
Yeah, that's the point, right? With tool calling the LLM becomes code. So instead of asking it to write an accounting software, you can hire the LLM to be your accountant.
Not necessarily. Consider a human assistant who performs repetitive tasks at an acceptable cost and accuracy while dealing with edge cases often autonomously.
If we want reliability - we come up with processes to make it reliable and not rely on individuals getting it right. Code is a way to create a reliable process in the digital world.
For some things that's acceptable or even good. If I want to add up a list of a million numbers human assistants aren't bringing any advantages though.
I'd like to apply for this job where I can make mistakes and it's considered an acceptable cost. Seriously, I can't remember the last time I made a significant error and it was acceptable. Maybe during training? Half the effort in any job is literally verifying correctness.