084 - Speculative Decoding: Making LLMs Generate Faster

Opublikowano: 2026-10-15

When a large language model generates text one token at a time, even a fast GPU hits a sequential bottleneck. This episode explains speculative decoding, an inference technique that prepares several tokens at once and checks them together, and when the extra computation pays off. Ordinary generation makes the target model run a full forward pass for every single token, since each prediction depends on the one before it. Speculative decoding adds a cheap draft step: a smaller model, a lightweight prediction head, or a pattern-matching method proposes...