Open Model Landscape & Benchmarking - Open-weight models are catching up to Frontier Labs in capabilities, making many AI Engineer applications possible that weren't before [1] - Open-source engines like VLM, SGLang, and Tensor TLM are readily available, reducing the need for custom model implementations [1] - Modal has created a public benchmark (modal.com/llmalmanac) for comparing the performance of different models and engines across various context lengths [2][3] Performance Analysis - Throughput is significantly higher when processing longer input contexts (prefill) compared to generating longer output sequences (decode), with up to a 4x improvement observed [15][16] - The time to first token (latency) remains nearly constant even with a 10x increase in input tokens, suggesting a "free lunch" by prioritizing context over reasoning [19] - Gemma 7B models show roughly the same throughput as Qwen 3 models, despite being 10x smaller in model weights, indicating optimization differences [12] Optimization & Infrastructure - Scaling out (adding more GPUs) is the primary method for increasing total throughput, rather than scaling up (optimizing a single GPU) [23] - Benchmarking methodology involves sending a thousand requests to determine maximum throughput and sending single requests to determine fastest possible server run time [24][25] - BF16 precision offers slower tensor core support compared to FP8 or FP4, suggesting potential for even greater performance gains with lower precision formats on newer hardware like Blackwell [16][17]