The two techniques this paper introduces, JetBlock and PostNAS, are LITERALLY NOT EVEN DEFINED.
There's a bunch of red flags in this paper. First, Nvidia did not release the code. The paper does not contain much information, certainly not enough to be reproducible. It's mostly jargon. That jargon means stuff, but exactly what is unclear. They will not tell us.
Even if these techniques were groundbreaking, what are we supposed to do with that information? They literally didn't give us the algorithms. The github repo the paper links to is empty. It's apparently under legal review. Maybe at some point they will release it. All we can do is wait.
They achieve impressive looking speedups, but they do so essentially by pruning unused parts of the model to individually game each benchmark. That is to say, if you use this method to specialize a model for MMLU, it's not like you can then use that model for an information retrieval or math question. They're basically training (or, pruning) on test, but only mention this in the paper in one place.
They evaluate on benchmarks that mostly measure world knowledge, but they freeze the linear layers and do not touch them. I wonder how much of the performance improvements it is attributable to the new method and how well it would perform if you just rip the attention blocks out and train or distill a minimal adapter that performs the requisite sequence mixing. My guess is that their method is worse compared to distilling the attention layers.
So no, it's not a breakthrough, business leaders do not need to reconsider everything, no this is not a new paradigm for researchers. Please don't post commentary on papers you didn't read, or didn't critically read. Tossing papers into an LLM, having it generate a few bullet points, then posting the resulting misinformation on twitter is not alpha. It sickens me.
NVIDIA research just made LLMs 53x faster. 🤯
Imagine slashing your AI inference budget by 98%.
This breakthrough doesn't require training a new model from scratch; it upgrades your existing ones for hyper-speed while matching or beating SOTA accuracy.
Here's how it works:
The technique is called Post Neural Architecture Search (PostNAS). It's a revolutionary process for retrofitting pre-trained models.
Freeze the Knowledge: It starts with a powerful model (like Qwen2.5) and locks down its core MLP layers, preserving its intelligence.
Surgical Replacement: It then uses a hardware-aware search to replace most of the slow, O(n²) full-attention layers with a new, hyper-efficient linear attention design called JetBlock.
Optimize for Throughput: The search keeps a few key full-attention layers in the exact positions needed for complex reasoning, creating a hybrid model optimized for speed on H100 GPUs.
The result is Jet-Nemotron: an AI delivering 2,885 tokens per second with top-tier model performance and a 47x smaller KV cache.
Why this matters to your AI strategy:
- Business Leaders: A 53x speedup translates to a ~98% cost reduction for inference at scale. This fundamentally changes the ROI calculation for deploying high-performance AI.
- Practitioners: This isn't just for data centers. The massive efficiency gains and tiny memory footprint (154MB cache) make it possible to deploy SOTA-level models on memory-constrained and edge hardware.
- Researchers: PostNAS offers a new, capital-efficient paradigm. Instead of spending millions on pre-training, you can now innovate on architecture by modifying existing models, dramatically lowering the barrier to entry for creating novel, efficient LMs.