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How fast is N tokens per second really?

mikeveerman.github.io

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Re: How fast is N tokens per second really?

#101
post #24
post #12

This is great. Agentic coding at 600+ tokens/sec is going to be a radically different beast. Coming soon-ish?

Do you have ideas/suggestions for agentic workflows that only start making sense at such speeds?

In my experience, current agentic workflows are so slow, that for many cases it only makes sense to run them in parallel. So a lot of context switching. If we could have 10-100× faster token generation, we could have task delivery at the speed of human review.

Re: How fast is N tokens per second really?

#102

It's interesting how even 5 tok/s is still much faster than you'd typically type, but feels glacially slow for an agent. On the other hand, I've been using Mimo and Minimax a lot recently. They routinely reach 100-150 tokens per second and that feels too fast , to the point where it's hard to keep up with what it's actually doing. Great for subagents though.

Looking at 5 tok/s after reading this comment made me think about why it felt slow and would be unacceptable for work. If you didn't plan or even sometimes despite planning, you have absolutely no idea if it is suddenly going to go off the rails in a wrong direction. Everyday, I'll look at the thinking and it seems pretty good until suddenly I have to slam the esc key because it decided to pursue a completely wrong direction. Much faster is better for skimming to make sure you don't have to throw everything away.

Re: How fast is N tokens per second really?

#104

It's interesting how even 5 tok/s is still much faster than you'd typically type, but feels glacially slow for an agent. On the other hand, I've been using Mimo and Minimax a lot recently. They routinely reach 100-150 tokens per second and that feels too fast , to the point where it's hard to keep up with what it's actually doing. Great for subagents though.

Looking at 5 tok/s after reading this comment made me think about why it felt slow and would be unacceptable for work. If you didn't plan or even sometimes despite planning, you have absolutely no idea if it is suddenly going to go off the rails in a wrong direction. Everyday, I'll look at the thinking and it seems pretty good until suddenly I have to slam the esc key because it decided to pursue a completely wrong d…

and if it goes fast enough, it can fail and you can prompt again before you need to worry about if it's going in the wrong direction. or, it will try multiple directions!

Re: How fast is N tokens per second really?

#105
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting point, i didn't consider the thought process as tokens.

I'm not sure if it's much more though.

Oh while coding i sure think far more "tokens" than i output to the editor, at least 4->1.

Now, if those should be counted in the process or only the output is a harder question.

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