Optimizing AI Models for Low Latency: Techniques and Best Practices

GenAI product building has three key components: consistency, accuracy, and latency. These components are crucial and should be implemented in stages:

• Build a solid data foundation.
• Develop an approach that ensures consistent results.
• Ensure the results are accurate.
• Optimize for latency.

In every real-time implementation:

Once consistency and accuracy are achieved, latency plays a key role.

Techniques for Low Latency Optimization

After achieving accuracy, focus on these techniques to optimize latency:

• Semantic Cache Implementation for similar questions.
• Disable Logging in the production environment.
• Database Optimization: Ensure proximity to the model serving region.
• Multi-Prompt Steps in messaging.
• Low Latency Models: GPT-4o-mini.
• Text Optimization: Balance cost and performance (e.g., Claude 3.5 Sonnet).
• Complex Reasoning: Use Gemini 1.5 Pro (gemini-1.5-pro).
• Optimize Values: Fine-tune input tokens, output tokens, temperature, and max tokens.
• Prompt Optimization: Leverage model context support.
• Utilize Larger Context Windows: Implement multitask prompts.

Infrastructure and Cost Considerations

• Quantization Effects: Using reduced precision (e.g., int8 instead of float32) may introduce minor, predictable delays due to quantization and dequantization steps.
• Fine-Tuned GPT Models: Require high-quality data for implementation.

Top 5 Practices to Master GenAI Product Development

• Solve the GenAI Aspect: Focus on prompt engineering and model versioning.
• Scale for Multiple Formats: Use prompt catalogs and maintain prompt versions.
• Optimize for Low Latency: Implement caching for key data, reuse existing data, and leverage retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) over documents, graphs, and summarized data.
• Ensure Accuracy Across the Board: Preprocess, normalize, and organize data effectively for the use case, using RAG for enhanced results.
• Focus on Safe Usage: Enforce guardrails to ensure responsible and secure deployments.

Entry of Agents

• Once the foundational aspects are achieved, you can migrate to an agentic approach. Ensure robust controls for seamless transitions.

Personal Note

My focus has been on solving and solutioning diverse product use cases. Being an independent consultant has allowed me to concentrate on solutioning aspects of GenAI, LLMs, unstructured data, prompt optimization, and latency reduction. It’s a tradeoff between working on focused areas versus engaging across different layers of implementation.

Happy to collaborate if you are working on GenAI product building or Enterprise GenAI adoption!

Happy Learning!!!