Operators, product owners, and people affected by the efficient inference decision.
Transformers · weeks 21
Frontier architectures & efficient inference
Long-context generation breaks latency and cost targets.
Opening production brief
A measurable problem, before a model.
prefill/decode, sampling, KV layout, GQA/MQA with version, owner, event time, and availability contracts.
Long-context generation breaks latency and cost targets. Every solution must state latency, cost, capacity, and fallback limits.
Offline evidence plus a deployable resolution: A capacity plan using efficient attention, quantization, batching, and modern routing.
Frame and baseline
Turn the production problem into explicit data, metric, and baseline contracts.
- 01↗
Autoregressive decoding policies
The model supplies possibilities; the decoding policy decides which possibilities can become product behavior.
65–90 min · checkpoint · deterministic lab - 02↗
KV caches, GQA/MQA, and long context
KV caching removes repeated history compute by turning context length into a first-class memory budget.
65–90 min · checkpoint · deterministic lab
Build and stress
Formalize the machinery, test counterexamples, and expose system limits.
- 03↗
Quantization, compilation, and fused kernels
Optimize the measured bottleneck, and treat every numeric or execution rewrite as a new artifact that must pass quality gates.
65–90 min · checkpoint · deterministic lab - 04↗
Continuous batching and speculative decoding
Throughput techniques earn their place only when they improve completed requests—not merely scheduled tokens.
65–90 min · checkpoint · deterministic lab
Resolve and operate
Join model behavior to architecture, observability, rollout, and rollback.
- 05↗
Distributed and MoE inference
Distributed inference is constrained by the slowest communication or routing boundary, not by the sum of advertised compute.
65–90 min · checkpoint · deterministic lab - HW↗
LLM inference capacity plan
Benchmark cache, batching, concurrency, sampling, and one quantized path on mixed traces.
Rubric · staged hints · reference resolution
Prerequisite guidance
2 concepts make this faster.
Prerequisites are guidance, never hard gates.