Comment by datadrivenangel
7 hours ago
The author does not deeply mention that quality/intelligence is a third dimension here in addition to throughput and latency, and the frontier is jagged so quality and intelligence require bespoke benchmarks to evaluate tradeoffs for speed and cost.
These are both good points that I attempted to cover, quotes:
> In practice, the efficient frontier is very jagged. Rather than a smooth, continuous line between outcomes, small changes can have big impacts. These cutoff points are often unintuitive and must be discovered empirically through sweeps.
> However, quantization introduces a new set of tradeoffs between quality and serving efficiency. This is a particularly jagged frontier, where a large degree of improvement to serving efficiency is possible with little-to-no reduction in model quality, especially when using microscaling floating-point number formats like MXFP4 and NVFP4.
Would appreciate ideas on how to explain in greater depth