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I think Claude fast mode is the first instance of an AI model which costs more per hour than a senior software developer. Faster, too, for most things, but for the things where it's not it's now humans that have the cost advantage.
Many people (self included) have the experience of doing manual labor, standing next to an industrial machine that could move the dirt that sits idle because their hands and backs are cheaper than gasoline.
Hm, I wonder how it works under the hood. Speculative sampling? Faster hardware?
7faul_sname
Isn't inference memory bound on kv cache? If that's the case then I think "smaller batch size" is probably sufficient to explain the faster inference, and the cost per token to Anthropic of 80TPS or 200TPS is not particularly large. But users are willing to pay much more for 200TPS (Anthropic hypothesizes).