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Inference economics of language models

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arxiv 2506.04645 v1 pith:DDMY6GII submitted 2025-06-05 cs.LG cs.DC

Inference economics of language models

classification cs.LG cs.DC
keywords tokencostinferencemodelserialspeedbandwidthlanguage
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
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We develop a theoretical model that addresses the economic trade-off between cost per token versus serial token generation speed when deploying LLMs for inference at scale. Our model takes into account arithmetic, memory bandwidth, network bandwidth and latency constraints; and optimizes over different parallelism setups and batch sizes to find the ones that optimize serial inference speed at a given cost per token. We use the model to compute Pareto frontiers of serial speed versus cost per token for popular language models.

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Cited by 12 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score.

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  5. Beyond Per-Token Pricing: A Concurrency-Aware Methodology for LLM Infrastructure Cost Estimation

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  11. Motivating Next-Gen Accelerators with Flexible (N:M) Activation Sparsity via Benchmarking Lightweight Post-Training Sparsification Approaches

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