TLDR AI · ENGINEERING & RESEARCH

ACCELERATING GEMMA 4: FASTER INFERENCE WITH MULTI-TOKEN PREDICTION DRAFTERS

blog.google4 min read

Summary from the TLDR AI newsletter

Gemma 4 models reduce latency bottlenecks and achieve improved responsiveness for developers by using Multi-Token Prediction drafters. These drafters deliver up to a 3x speedup without any degradation in output quality or reasoning logic due to a specialized speculative decoding architecture. Speculative decoding decouples token generation from verification. It utilizes idle compute to 'predict' several future tokens at once with the drafter in less time than it takes for the target model to process just one token. The target model then verifies all of these suggested tokens in parallel.