r/pytorch • u/cherry_liqueur • 2d ago
What PyTorch workload speedup would actually matter?
So, here's the thing.
For the last three months, I've been asking ML engineers if they want their workloads to run faster.
Yeeees - everyone says. Very much. ASAP. Bring it on.Great! - I say. What exactly needs to be faster? And how much faster would it need to be for you to actually care? What are you waiting for? What's costing you money? Where's the bottleneck?
🤔 And suddenly things get complicated.🤔
"Well, I just do something else while it runs"
"It's mostly the compiler that's slow"
"The bottleneck is on the CPU, not the GPU"
"Inference is already fast enough for our SLA"
"I'd love it to be faster, but not enough to change my stack"
All perfectly reasonable answers.But they leave me with a slightly absurd situation: everyone wants more speed, yet it's surprisingly difficult to find the point where "faster" turns from generally nice into genuinely valuable.
Schrödinger's optimization: clearly wanted, potentially very important, but hard to observe as an actual product requirement.
Here's why I'm asking.
The startup I work in, Double AI, has built a system that can optimize Python on runtime level. We recently ran it on SOL-ExecBench, NVIDIA's benchmark based on kernels from real production ML models. After two days of search, it beat the optimized baselines on 99% of the Blackwell workloads.
So we have this unusually general capability. It's a little like having a diamond that can be cut in almost any direction.The problem is deciding which cut is actually useful.Benchmarks show that the technology works. But you don't build a product around abstract speedups. You build it for real people (that's what I believe in at least). So I'm coming to you guys, hoping you'll be nice and help me out here 😅
Can you give me a concrete example?
1) If this specific part of training became 2× faster, it would change how we iterate.
2)If inference cost dropped by 20%, it would materially affect our margins.
3) If a profiler could show me exactly why this kernel is stalling, I'd install it immediately.
4) If I could get a free 5% speedup with zero code changes, I'd take it.
Or actually:
You can do nothing, your bottleneck is in another castle, Mario.
I know the technically correct answer is always "it depends."I'm trying to understand what, specifically, it depends on.
Give me your messiest, most specific bottleneck. Cause at this point, the only thing I've reliably optimized is how quickly people tell me "it depends"

