This is a fair critique! We plan to use our system to generate many more inference libraries of this nature, and I'll make it a point to release better, broader correctness measures when we do so.
Unfortunately, not at present; we went for FP8 because we believed it was generally the best tradeoff of quality and speed. Allowed faster iteration as well.
We believe our improvements would hold on BF16, but let me check.
Yes, speculative decoding will make both us and VLLM faster, but we believe it would be a relatively even bump on both sides, so we didn't include it in this comparison. Worth another test!
We validate with MMLU and Hellaswag presently, and are getting this independently verified by a 3rd party.
We have considered open-sourcing some of our optimized inference libraries in the future, but have not yet come to a decision on this.
Also if you need a rough intuition as to why this is possible: it's because this entire inference stack was built for exactly one model, and thus we can really tune the entire framework accordingly.