Frontier labs have their own variants of MLA and certainly their own balance/scaling-laws for things like MoE vs FC vs Attn. MoE scales really well for inference with horizontal scaling + batching, which these guys luv.
On the architectures side, I'm a lot more interesting in attention residuals than anything else, one of those things that seems obvious in hindsight and Kimi have proven it at scale.
Same with speculative decoding... They all do something, but there are known techniques that are substantially better - that just were't known when they started development of the previous models.
How useful is speculative decoding in a batched setting where you get paid for throughput (aggregated across users) and you mostly don’t get paid for latency or single-session throughput?
Local models are moving towards batched inference too, if only for non-interactive use. An early experimental patchset for DS4 (running DeepSeek V4 Flash) seems to show 2x aggregate tok/s decode when processing 8 streams concurrently, and more than 3x when processing as many as 32 streams concurrently. Note that prefill (which is not helped significantly by this change) then becomes a larger fraction of total wall-clock time, so the overall gain is lower (i.e. prefill is akin to a 'serial' task wrt. Amdahl's law).
MTP will still be highly valuable for interactive use of course.
On the architectures side, I'm a lot more interesting in attention residuals than anything else, one of those things that seems obvious in hindsight and Kimi have proven it at scale.