Does anyone know why the most common method to speed up inference time is quantization? I keep hearing about all sorts of new methods but nearly none of them is implemented in practice (except for flash attention).
In addition to the other answers in this thread, there's a practical one: sometimes (ok, often) you want to run a model on a card that doesn't have enough VRAM for it. Quantisation is a way to squeeze it down so it fits. For instance I've got a 4090 that won't fit the original Llama3 70b at 16 bits per param, but it will give me usable token rates at 2 bits.
It's particularly useful in memory bound workflows like batch size = 1 LLM inference where you're bottlenecked by how quickly you can send weights to your GPU. This is why at least in torchao we strongly recommend people try out int4 quantization.
At larger batch sizes you become compute bound so quantization matters less and you have to rely on hardware support to accelerate smaller dtypes like fp8
Because the way LLMs work is more-or-less "for every token, read the entire matrix from memory and do math on it". Math is fast, so if you manage to use only half the bits to store each item in the matrix, you only have to do half as much work. Of course, sometimes those least-significant-bits were relied-upon in the original training.
Has anyone worked on making tokens 'clusters of words with specific semantic meaning'?
e.g. instead of tokens ['i', 'am', 'beautiful'] having tokens ['I am', 'beautiful'] on the premise that 'I am' is a common set of bytes for a semantic token that identifies a 'property of self'?
Or taking that further and having much larger tokens based on statistical analysis of common phrases of ~5 words or such?
I think you might be thinking of applying a kind of low-rank decomposition to the vocabulary embeddings. A quick search on Google Scholar suggests that this might be useful in the context of multilingual tokenization.
During inference, it is not a matrix x matrix operation, but rather a weight matrix x input vector operation, as we are generating one token at a time. The bottleneck now is how fast we can load the weight matrix from memory to tensor cores, hence the need for weight quantization.
