Comment by hansvm

1000x improvements unlock qualitatively new capabilities, even when only applied to subcomponents. Moreover, the fact that it's only 0.1% of the runtime is usually [0] an artifact of the entire project being treated that way -- why write this the right way when it won't move the needle on the composite project?

[0] Yes, for LLMs we're closer to the bound than 1000x. Even there though, basic pytorch operations are often 2x slower than simple rewrites, better scheduling algorithms have a history of closer to 5x-10x gains, and all of that supposes you don't have further architectural improvements over time. Moreover, who's to say that legitimately fast tokenization doesn't unlock additional capabilities elsewhere which people have ignored because it was never close to viable?