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Two different tricks for fast LLM inference

seangoedecke.com · 2,103 words · saved by 3 readers

Anthropic and OpenAI both recently announced “fast mode”: a way to interact with their best coding model at significantly higher speeds. These two versions of fast mode are very different. Anthropic’s offers up to 2.5x tokens per second (so around 170, up from Opus 4.6’s 65). OpenAI’s offers more than 1000 tokens per second (up from GPT-5.3-Codex’s 65 tokens per second, so 15x). So OpenAI’s fast mode is six times faster than Anthropic’s1. However, Anthropic’s big advantage is that they’re serving their actual model. When you use their fast mode, you get real Opus 4.6, while when you use OpenAI’s fast mode you get GPT-5.3-Codex-Spark, not the real GPT-5.3-Codex. Spark is indeed much faster, but is a notably less capable model: good enough for many tasks, but it gets confused and messes up tool calls in ways that vanilla GPT-5.3-Codex would never do. Why the differences? The AI labs aren’t advertising the details of how their fast modes work, but I’m pretty confident it’s something like

Anthropic and OpenAI both recently announced “fast mode”: a way to interact with their best coding model at significantly higher speeds. These two versions of fast mode are very different. Anthropic’s offers up to 2.5x tokens per second (so around 170, up from Opus 4.6’s 65). OpenAI’s offers more than 1000 tokens per second (up from GPT-5.3-Codex’s 65 tokens per second, so 15x). So OpenAI’s fast mode is six times faster than Anthropic’s 1 . However, Anthropic’s big advantage is that they’re serving their actual model. When you use their fast mode, you get real Opus 4.6, while when you use Open

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