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Accelerating GPT-5.6 Sol Ultrafast

cerebras.ai

31–40 of 295 posts

Re: Accelerating GPT-5.6 Sol Ultrafast

#31
post #21

> allowing Sol Ultrafast to accelerate your most time-sensitive, mission-critical work Curious, what are some of the use cases?

The example they give about debugging a service outage is good. For large companies, a very large burst expenditure on fast tokens to debug the outage as quickly as possible would be a good investment.

Re: Accelerating GPT-5.6 Sol Ultrafast

#32

This kills the crab. Compilation time will be a genuine bottleneck for slop coding if this becomes the standard generation rate over the next few years. Go, Zig or even C99 with TCC for dev builds, any language that can get you systems-level performance (or close to it) in a dev environment where you can iterate in ms rather than minutes is going to be immensely more appealing than generating a potential prototype in…

Maybe then LLM's will switch to outputting raw machine code?

No. This conveys a fundamental misunderstanding of how anything pertaining to programming works. This will never happen, ever. For example, take...

  printf("Hello, world");
vs. a plausible illustration of how it might be compiled down to machine code...

  48 65 6C 6C 6F 2C 20 77 6F 72 6C 64
  48 83 EC 28
  48 8D 0D F5 0F 00 00
  E8 F0 00 00 00
  33 C0
  48 83 C4 28
  C3
The latter now takes up 10x as many tokens (= 10x the cost/time, + context penalties), and is now architecture-specific, impossible to apply non-brittle program-wide optimizations to, etc. There is absolutely zero reason to ever have the LLM act as a compiler no matter how fast it is. Even if you believe LLMs will reach a state where they can actually generate good code at this level, you would be better off having them generate the compiler they would use.

Re: Accelerating GPT-5.6 Sol Ultrafast

#33

This kills the crab. Compilation time will be a genuine bottleneck for slop coding if this becomes the standard generation rate over the next few years. Go, Zig or even C99 with TCC for dev builds, any language that can get you systems-level performance (or close to it) in a dev environment where you can iterate in ms rather than minutes is going to be immensely more appealing than generating a potential prototype in…

Maybe then LLM's will switch to outputting raw machine code?

A great future for us all to look forward to. Human readability gone, any changes must go through a providers API so cost+restrictions are a constant and we'll need far more tokens for even simple operations. Call me old fashioned, still like to understand the code I merge, especially since I've seen Fable and Sol make sometimes utterly egregious mistakes in simple, well scoped requests that erode any trust I can muster...

Re: Accelerating GPT-5.6 Sol Ultrafast

#34

This kills the crab. Compilation time will be a genuine bottleneck for slop coding if this becomes the standard generation rate over the next few years. Go, Zig or even C99 with TCC for dev builds, any language that can get you systems-level performance (or close to it) in a dev environment where you can iterate in ms rather than minutes is going to be immensely more appealing than generating a potential prototype in…

I think it's pretty obvious that, in that world, the AIs will simply be tasked with making the compilers faster. It's already happening with their own stack, after all.

Re: Accelerating GPT-5.6 Sol Ultrafast

#36
post #34

This kills the crab. Compilation time will be a genuine bottleneck for slop coding if this becomes the standard generation rate over the next few years. Go, Zig or even C99 with TCC for dev builds, any language that can get you systems-level performance (or close to it) in a dev environment where you can iterate in ms rather than minutes is going to be immensely more appealing than generating a potential prototype in…

I think it's pretty obvious that, in that world, the AIs will simply be tasked with making the compilers faster. It's already happening with their own stack, after all.

Speed is independent of quality. LLMs are currently completely incapable of producing a good compiler. I'm not convinced that's going to change (and if it does change, we're all unemployed).

Re: Accelerating GPT-5.6 Sol Ultrafast

#37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The stake in the side of cerebras has always been that the economics are pretty poor. Who knows if they will subsidizes it to mitigate sticker shock, but it's a safe assumption that it will be scarily expensive. However if you are in a "cost is no obstacle, speed is god" position, it will likely be pure magic.

Can anyone explain why Cerberus needs to be _fast_ instead of _cheap_? I don't think I understand why they aren't leveraging the increased speed to do batching to serve more customers at a "normal" tok/s. Is the limitation, even on cerberus, still that the cache can only serve so many concurrent sessions over time? Is there no scaling advantage? I genuinely do not understand how any of this works.

I have no idea, but I've assumed that batching can't work on Cerebras.

Batching works because of severe memory bottleneck, but Cerebras whole thing is serving models out of "L1 cache" (?).

Re: Accelerating GPT-5.6 Sol Ultrafast

#38
post #27

Unless I have read over it, besides the animation in the intelligence vs speed graph which only mentions internal data and not whether they truly reran the AA suite, there is no actually solid statement on the important aspect of performance. Neither the Cerebras or OpenAI post [0] outright state that this performs exactly the same as regular 5.6 Sol. I feel if this was 1:1 just Sol but much faster, they'd (rightfull…

"delivering up to 750 output tokens per second and without any quality compromise" seems pretty definitive.

Re: Accelerating GPT-5.6 Sol Ultrafast

#39
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's pretty obvious that, in that world, the AIs will simply be tasked with making the compilers faster. It's already happening with their own stack, after all.

Speed is independent of quality. LLMs are currently completely incapable of producing a good compiler. I'm not convinced that's going to change (and if it does change, we're all unemployed).

They don't have produce a good compiler. They just have to take the ones that already exist go much faster. That's likely much easier, and you can validate using existing test suites.

Re: Accelerating GPT-5.6 Sol Ultrafast

#40
post #26
post #6

> Compared with output speeds reported by Artificial Analysis GPT-5.6 Sol on Ultrafast mode runs 11x faster than Fable 5, and 5x faster than Opus 4.8 on Fast mode. Awesome work. I'm personally very excited for faster models/inference. I think speed is underrated to some degree in the current conversation. For a while, I was using Cursor's Composer quite a lot, even over frontier models, just because of how darn fast…

What do you need speed for? That's a genuine question, I feel like the limiting factor already is my creativity, attention span and budget. And I'm not even yet optimizing cost by batching things like review to slow local models over night, or schedule tasks to take full advantage of my subscriptions.

I just finished waiting almost four hours for Fable to write 700 lines of code, based on my three paragraph prompt. Some speed on these harder tasks would definitely be welcome!

It also spent almost 800k tokens on these lines…

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