Not just custom chips, but custom chips which derive much of their performance from enormous amounts of SRAM. There's no denying that approach is fast, but it's also incredibly expensive, and SRAM scaling has slowed to a crawl so it won't get much cheaper any time soon.

AFAIU, speculative decoding (and this fancier version of spec. decoding) does not reduce accuracy.

Anyway, Novita is doing significantly better on the vendor verifier chart than Together, so the low quality must be partially Together's fault at least.

I don't see why that would be true. As I understand, the verifier is checking if the tokens are good-enough, not if they're the exact same tokens it would have selected. The predicted tokens could be consistently slightly worse, which could have a cascading effect to make the overall output a lot worse.

That said, I still think some providers are cheating. Please correct me if the test below is flawed.

I generated texts at temperature = 0 vs temperature = 2. At high temperature, the distributions effectively become flatter, meaning the difference between real and draft effective distributions (the D_LK used in theorem 3.5 of 2211.17192) becomes smaller. When T=2, the model speaks complete gibberish, so the effective distribution must be pretty flat. This should mean fewer rejections --> a lot faster speculative decoding. Yet, I see no increase in throughput at all...