AI Under the Hood: Part I: Understanding the Machine
The LLM is always the bottleneck. In every production system I’ve built, the same pattern emerges. Your backend sits idle. Your database purrs at 5% CPU. And your language model - the brilliant, expensive centerpiece - grinds through requests at 2 seconds while users expect 200 milliseconds. Costs spiral. Latency kills user experience. The problem isn’t configuration or model selection. It’s the architecture itself. Transformers were designed for parallel training but forced into sequential generation. Stateless by design but requiring growing state. Optimized for throughput but deployed for latency. Every optimization exists to bridge these gaps. To make LLMs fast, you first need to understand why they’re slow, and that starts with how they actually work under the hood. ...