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Today, we're joined by Chris Lott, senior director of engineering at Qualcomm AI Research to discuss accelerating large language model inference. We explore the challenges presented by the LLM encoding and decoding (aka generation) and how these interact with various hardware constraints such as FLOPS, memory footprint and memory bandwidth to limit key inference metrics such as time-to-first-token, tokens per second, and tokens per joule. We then dig into a variety of techniques that can be used to accelerate inference such as KV compression, quantization, pruning, speculative decoding, and leveraging small language models (SLMs). We also discuss future directions for enabling on-device agentic experiences such as parallel generation and software tools like Qualcomm AI Orchestrator.
Qualcomm AI Research is dedicated to advancing AI to make its core capabilities — perception, reasoning, and action — ubiquitous across devices. Their work makes it possible for billions of users around the world to have AI-enhanced experiences on devices powered by Qualcomm Technologies. To learn more about what Qualcomm Technologies is up to on the research front, visit twimlai.com/qualcomm.
