Making Workers AI faster and more efficient: Performance optimization with KV cache compression and speculative decoding

During Birthday Week 2023, Workers AI was launched, and since then, improvements have been made based on customer feedback. The focus has been on making large language model (LLM) generation faster. Upgrades include upgraded hardware, KV cache compression, and speculative decoding. These enhancements aim to provide faster and more efficient inference for customers. Newer generation GPUs support larger models and faster inference, while novel methods of boosting efficiency have been developed. Memory management has also been optimized to reduce the bottleneck caused by limited vRAM availability. Speculative decoding is another technique that allows for faster throughput by predicting multiple tokens at once. These improvements aim to enhance user experience and provide better performance on Workers AI platform.