A model may spend months learning on a giant cluster, but after training it enters a stranger world. Production traffic arrives asynchronously. Prompts have different lengths. Some users ask for one sentence; others ask for a small novel. Everyone wants the first token immediately, the rest smoothly, and the whole thing cheaply. This is why 'inference' is a misleadingly small word. It sounds like one forward pass. A modern inference system is closer to a miniature operating system wrapped around a token factory. It assembles context, tokenizes text, routes requests, schedules GPU work, manages memory, executes transformer kernels, samples outputs, and streams text'while serving thousands of users at different stages.
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