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Re:The path to ubiquitous AI (17k tokens/sec) by zozbot234 on Friday February 20, 2026 @06:57AM (#47086914)
Low-latency inference is a huge waste of power; if you're going to the trouble of making an ASIC, it should be for dog-slow but very high throughput inference. Undervolt the devices as much as possible and use sub-threshold modes, multiple Vt and body biasing extensively to save further power and minimize leakage losses, but also keep working in fine-grained nodes to reduce areas and distances. The sensible goal is to expend the least possible energy per operation, even at increased latency.
Re:The path to ubiquitous AI (17k tokens/sec) by dust42 on Friday February 20, 2026 @07:09AM (#47087023)
Low latency inference is very useful in voice-to-voice applications. You say it is a waste of power but at least their claim is that it is 10x more efficient. We'll see but if it works out it will definitely find its applications.
Re:The path to ubiquitous AI (17k tokens/sec) by zozbot234 on Friday February 20, 2026 @07:18AM (#47087101)
This is not voice-to-voice though, end-to-end voice chat models (the Her UX) are completely different.
Re:The path to ubiquitous AI (17k tokens/sec) by dust42 on Friday February 20, 2026 @07:29AM (#47087185)
I haven't found any end-to-end voice chat models useful. I had much better results with separate STT-LLM-TTS. One big problem is the turn detection and having inference with 150-200ms latency would allow for a whole new level of quality. I would just use it with a prompt: "You think the user is finished talking?" and then push it to a larger model. The AI should reply within the ballpark of 600ms-1000ms. Faster is often irritating, slower will make the user to start talking again.
Re:The path to ubiquitous AI (17k tokens/sec) by PhunkyPhil on Friday February 20, 2026 @01:19PM (#47091667)
I think it's really useful for agent to agent communication, as long as context loading doesn't become a bottleneck. Right now there can be noticeable delays under the hood, but at these speeds we'll never have to worry about latency when chain calling hundreds or thousands of agents in a network (I'm presuming this is going to take off in the future). Correct me if I'm wrong though.