Speculative decoding pipeline showing draft, verify, and commit stages for local LLM inference

Speculative Decoding Is Finally Useful for Local LLMs

Speculative decoding has moved from inference-paper trivia into the local LLM hot path. The useful version combines ngram speculation for repeated text, MTP for models that were trained to draft ahead, and KV compression like TurboQuant when long context is the real constraint.

May 7, 2026 · 11 min · 2137 words · Marco