LLM System Design Interview #2 — The Lossless Speedup Trick

How top AI teams double inference speed without quantization, pruning, or touching model weights - by exploiting a core asymmetry in Transformers.

You’re in an AI Engineer interview at OpenAI. The interviewer asks:

“The product team wants a 2x speedup on our Llama 3 70B endpoint, but they’ve forbidden any lossy techniques like quantization or pruning. How can you losslessly accelerate inference, and what core asymmetry in the Transformer are you exploiting?”

Most candidates say: “Well, we could imp…