The Reason Your AI Chatbot Feels Fast Has Nothing to Do With a Better Model

You have probably noticed that ChatGPT or Claude streams words to your screen almost instantly. But behind the scenes, generating each word requires a massive model to perform billions of computations. So how do these systems feel so fast? One of the key answers is a technique called speculative decoding — an inference optimization that makes large language models generate text significantly faster without changing a single word of their output. First — Why is Text generation slow?...