Beyond the models getting better; there are still huge gains available in the inference engine side with new tricks like Dflash, MRT, turboquant - for some usecases these can multiply the speeds. There are even some model specific optimized kernels like for DeepSeek 4 flash that seem wild.
Makes me feel we are nowhere near the optimum yet.
Examples: https://dasroot.net/posts/2026/05/gemma-4-speed-hacks-mtp-df...