DeepSeek's DSpark Brings Speculative Decoding Back Into the Spotlight — Here's What Developers Need to Know (opens in new tab)

Introduction Speculative decoding is one of those techniques that has been "almost ready for production" for the better part of three years. A small draft model proposes tokens; a larger target model verifies them in a single forward pass. In theory, you get 2–4× throughput. In practice, the draft model has to be cheap, fast, and good enough at mimicking the target's distribution, which is a much harder combination than it sounds. Yesterday, a new paper from DeepSeek quietly climbed to the to...