This is awesome, but tokenization is typically <0.1% of total inference time.
Presumably there's a host of applications that just need to tokenize, though, and this would be great for those!
1/1000 of inference compute is a non-trivial workload at scale. Gartner estimates ~$28B in inference spend for 2026 making this a $28 million dollar per year workload (edit: based on the assumption above)
Source: https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2026-07-2...
Always good to make it 0.001%
Time to first token, especially for smaller models, can be sharply reduced.
Latency can be just as important as overall throughput, especially for inference providers like Groq and Cerebras.
[dead]
I run an AI platform and we need to tokenize fast and early to make a lot of decisions on the subsequent steps (things like routing, rate limiting and such). Its really important to do this efficiently even though its not a large % of total end to end time for the request.