Lepton AI’s Post

People often ask why prices like $2.8/m token for Llama 405B, while being super fast, are still profitable at Lepton AI. We've even been asked by a leading GPU provider! So, I figured we should share some technical analysis. This information could benefit the community. We've taken these statistics and analysis for granted, but they might not be obvious to everyone. 1. Big batches: Each request receives an output of ~30 tokens/second. Batching (grouping multiple requests simultaneously) significantly improves total throughput, often 10x or higher than a single request. GPUs are more efficient with larger batches. 2. Dynamic batching: This technique immediately adds a new request to an existing batch instead of making it wait, ensuring the GPU always works at high capacity. 3. Input tokens: The ~30 tokens/second refers to output tokens. Input tokens are processed much faster (known as "prefilling"). Typically, the input length is many times larger than the output (3x to 10x). This increases the total number of tokens processed, explaining why there is often separate billing for input and output. 4. Quantization: Using 8-bit integers or 8-bit floats instead of 16-bit floats reduces memory usage and speeds up processing because the GPU accesses less memory. Newer GPUs also have hardware instructions for lower bit numbers, increasing speed further. For example, the new Nvidia Blackwell GPU supports 4-bit floats (fp4). Quantization also saves memory, allowing even bigger batches from point 1, making it more economic. 5. Speculative decoding: This method uses a smaller model to predict the next token. For example, predicting "you" after "it is good to see" doesn't require a large model. Smaller models make such predictions faster. The Medusa algorithm by Tianle Cai is a specific example of this approach. 6. Prompt caching: LLMs often encounter repeated prefixes, such as "you are a smart AI agent" in system prompts. Caching these prefilled prompts avoids recalculating them, speeding up repeated requests. 7. Optimizing GPU setups: This involves using large GPUs for big models, small GPUs for small models, and matching GPUs to specific tasks—some are better for prefilling, others for decoding. There are many optimization opportunities here. This is not a complete list. We integrate these methods (and a growing number of more) in our runtime to ensure profitability with reasonable traffic. Lepton is created by experts who have developed key AI software over the past decade - Caffe, onnx, pytorch - alongside cloud experts like the creator of etcd and core contributors to Kubernetes. We provide not only LLM APIs, but also a full cloud-native experience to help you find, use, and optimize GPUs on our cloud platform. We love the open-source and open-access community. What AI technical explanation would you like to hear next?

# Llama3 405B, API, Quantization, and Model Size Performance measurements of Llama3.1 405B, orchestrated from OpenRouter , one of the leading LLM aggregation platforms. Here are my couple cents of the model: - It's amazing to see the quick support of the model by almost all providers. Open source makes software and model co-development much easy. In our case, it took us minimal python code change to support it (like, minutes). - Llama 3.1 405B is indeed a model hard to make profitable. Taking half a machine or a machine to run, its cost is significant and speed is still so-so. Most providers keep it around 30 tokens/s (see pic) to make economic sense. In comparison, 70B models can go north of 150 tokens/s. - You will still be able to break even. Of course, this is dependent on a good optimization, and a good workload saturation. To our VC friends: for pure API service at this price tag, kindly not expect an 80% profit margin like conventional SaaS though. - In addition to top performance optimization, the Lepton AI API makes conscious balances between the many parameters - speed, price, concurrency, cost - to make sure that it is sustainable. - Quantization is going to be a standard. Folks, forget about FP16. Int8/FP8 is the way to go. If you still feel uncomfortable, let me tell you that back in the days AI frameworks worried about precision and still supports FP64. Have you ever used FP64 in your neural nets? - Quantization needs care. Gone are the days when one scale is enough for the whole tensor. You'll need to do channel wise / group wise quantization to make sure things do not degrade. - My bold prediction is that, 405B adoption will still be limited by the speed and price constraint. But I am not much worried, as I expect at least another 4x efficiency improvement over the next year or so. - I am looking forward to testing out Mistral Large 123B! Our Tuna engine supports it out of box, although to honor the research license, we'll refrain from hosting a public API. If you are interested, let us know. - Andrej Karpathy has an awesome tweet about small models FTW. I totally agree. In vertical applications you probably don't need models that big. 70B is normally good enough, and in many cases 8B is really good with finetuning! - It's great that llama 3.1 allows (and in some way recommends) finetuning your own model. - I also want to give a shout out to the vLLM project. We have our own engine but vLLM is simply great. Our platform supports it too. Last but not least, public API is one thing but feel free to reach out to us for enterprise / dedicated deployments. We believe that AI is awesome beyond APIs, and we build a full AI cloud to serve your end to end needs.

DistriFusion: multi-GPU parallel diffusion model acceleration at CVPR poster #232, highlight poster