This weekend, AI Twitter (X) was filled with with performance reports from groq’s LPU inference Engine - these images and graphs showed impressive token per second generations in the order of 500 t/s, orders of magnitude compared with GPU inference!  But first things first:

What is Groq?

Groq is an LLM model inference API, It responds incredibly quickly and is powered by a custom chip architecture, the so-called Language Processing Unit (LPU).

What does this mean for Enterprise?

Unfortunately, not too much for now, for now, Groq is only available with a very limited number of models via API, which typically is not appropriate for enterprises that have strict data residency requirements.

What is my next best option?

Most enterprises require self-hosting of their LLM applications, or when hosted for it to be hosted with a trusted 3rd party like AWS or Azure. For now, Groq isn’t available in data centers (although we are looking forward to when it becomes available!) The next best option is to highly optimized GPU and CPU inference, which are readily available in most VPCs.

How can I ensure that my model is fast and highly optimized?

Optimizing Generative AI workloads is not a simple feat; in fact, the latency difference between optimized and unoptimized applications can be up to 20x, resulting in over 10x overspending on cloud computing. It can take expert ML Engineers 2-4 months per model to optimize inference to ensure optimal latency and costs without impacting performance.

This is why our clients use Titan Takeoff. Titan Takeoff is a containerized high-performance inference server; it provides all the infrastructure ML teams need to build excellent self-hosted Generative AI applications. Takeoff automatically applies state-of-the-art inference optimization techniques to ensure all models are as fast as possible. The TitanML team has a research team led by Dr Jamie Dborin whose role is to benchmark and develop the latest techniques. Engineers can focus on building great applications rather than fiddling around with the constantly evolving inference optimization landscape.

Groq is, without a doubt, the fastest inference API available right now and is a fantastic choice for very low-cost inference when data residency and privacy are not necessary, such as start-ups. We are looking forward to when it becomes available in data centers!

However, for enterprises, we need to think about how we can best optimize the hardware that we already have. Titan Takeoff is the turnkey self-hosted solution that always ensures best-in-class inference optimization.

‍