Smaller, faster, safer: running Kimi and GLM at scale

(blog.cloudflare.com)

212 points | by ascorbic 16 hours ago

11 comments

  • scrlk 13 hours ago
    Nice to see a provider being transparent about KV cache quantisation. I've been suspecting that some providers do this silently whilst heavily promoting their unquantised weights, even though KV quantisation can degrade quality more than weight quantisation.

    However, I wish their testing were more detailed. Firstly, some model families are more sensitive to KV quantisation than others (only Kimi K2.6 was tested). Secondly, the evaluation suite they use to claim that FP8 KV quantisation is indistinguishable is noticeably lacking coding benchmarks; in long-running tasks, minor tool call errors compound over time.

    • amluto 12 hours ago
      They made an extremely strong claim:

      > None of this would matter if it changed the model's answers

      If they want to assert that the answers don’t change, then perhaps they should calculate the statistical distance between the token probability outputs or something to that effect. I doubt the results would indicate that the answers don’t change by any reasonable interpretation.

      Maybe the results are still good enough.

    • anonova 12 hours ago
      vLLM's study also concluded that "FP8 can deliver meaningful latency and capacity gains with small or negligible accuracy loss". Their benchmarks include LiveCodeBench 6.

      https://vllm-project.github.io/2026/04/22/fp8-kvcache.html

      • Tepix 2 hours ago
        vLLM tested with Llama-3.3-70B-Instruct, Qwen3-30B-A3B-Instruct-2507, Qwen3-30B-A3B-Thinking-2507, and Qwen3.5-27B.

        I'm wondering if it needs to be tested with every other model or not.

  • HDBaseT 7 hours ago
    I think Cloudflare not providing ZDR on their inference is the biggest public indicator that Cloudlare glows.

    We let all traffic get MITM'd, now we're letting our AI conversation get tracked. Cloudflare reeks like a US Honeypot.

    • stingraycharles 23 minutes ago
      This sounds like FUD unless backed by evidence.

      Cloudflare’s inference absolutely does support ZDR, as long as you use unified billing (ie not using BYOK).

  • syntaxing 13 hours ago
    > View pricing in the Cloudflare dashboard ↗

    Why… I wanted to see if it’s worth it to use cloudflare’s endpoint but I can’t even see the pricing

    • maxmcd 11 hours ago
      I'm not sure how accurate this is, but there is pricing here: https://openrouter.ai/provider/cloudflare
      • culi 10 hours ago
        So they don't even support K3? What's the point. K2.7 Code is practically free already
        • BadBadJellyBean 8 hours ago
          They do:

          Input tokens (per 1M)$3.00 Cached input tokens (per 1M)$0.30 Output tokens (per 1M)$15.00

          • culi 7 hours ago
            Not sure where you're getting that from but it's not on the pricing page. Nor is K3 mentioned in the post
  • mordae 1 hour ago
    Yeah, I've noticed them recently on OR and whitelisted. Then I backed-off pretty quickly after seeing the cache hit rates. It was also rather revealing to see how some provider hit rates differ when you are using them directly vs via OR.
  • vietvu 4 hours ago
    Thanks for the transpiration but this is too shallow when talking about LLM serving.
    • bigbaguette 3 hours ago
      Could you suggest good resources about LLM serving? Blogs, articles...
      • Tepix 2 hours ago
        The latest Latent.Space episode https://www.latent.space/p/inference-eng
      • vietvu 3 hours ago
        I cannot think of any that so concentrated. Best place to me is r/localllama on reddit. Unsloth website and twitter posts is a good place too (usually in localllama too).
  • om8 9 hours ago
    Why int4? There are a lot of superior 4 bit formats like nf4 from bitsandbytes.
    • Tepix 2 hours ago
      Well, INT4 is good enough apparently and it's very fast.
  • joshuamcginnis 11 hours ago
    > If squeezing the best open models onto GPUs and serving them to millions of developers sounds like your kind of problem, come work with us.

    What is the typical job title and/or skillset for this?

    • Tepix 2 hours ago
      Latent space is calling the whole subject "inference engineering" in their episode https://www.latent.space/p/inference-eng
    • simonw 11 hours ago
      I've seen this called MLOps.
      • buildbot 8 hours ago
        MLOps though typically wouldn't been going quantization? It requires some careful testing of accuracy and performance even today.

        Applied ML Research Engineer or something maybe, not that I have ever seen that title. Maybe just catchall ML Engineer...

    • overfeed 9 hours ago
      What is the typical job title and/or skillset for this?

      It can be any one of many jobs depending on how high close to the metal one's focus is, but the highest headcount role is usually SRE/Infra/Ops with GPU knowledge sprinkled on top. That is to say Linux sysadmin, networking, fleet management, scaling, incident troubleshooting, etc.

  • brokenodo 14 hours ago
    I was interested in reading this until my slop detector went off at the paragraph starting with “It's worth being precise about where the benefit comes from, because it isn't raw speed.”

    I love AI, but I really hate reading it.

    • hankbond 14 hours ago
      I have had to stop commenting this because it would end up on 50% of the posts here. I really wish we could flag prose as ai-generated on here and just filter it out.
      • hamdingers 12 hours ago
        Drives me nuts that comments are held to a higher standard than submissions.

        HN is for conversation between humans[1] (about AI generated blogspam, apparently)

        1. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

        • mannanj 11 hours ago
          Meta recently added a filter as a requirement for posts on Facebook. if it was ai generated, you are required to check off a box for that on your posts.

          I've been asking for that for some time.

          • HDBaseT 9 hours ago
            This is only to help them filter out AI generations for their own training data. There is no way you can "block" all "ai generated content" from your view.
      • dgellow 12 hours ago
        Don’t stop commenting about it, if there is something we (the readers) can do is ensure it is seen as uncool to post slop content
        • serf 11 hours ago
          fine but please realize that also just pushes people away from caring about the comment section at all, too.

          I can only read so many (either pro OR against) ".. IT'S AI! ! !" comments before skipping the thread. I can't be the only one.

      • gr_norm 13 hours ago
        LinkedIn (of all places!) announced a button for flagging this recently: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/hsrinivasan1_ai-slop-is-a-top...

        How well it would work on this site, I'm not sure.

        • speedgoose 13 hours ago
          If it works, it’s going to be the best feature introduced by a social network in a long time. Incredible that it comes from LinkedIn.
          • SchemaLoad 3 hours ago
            I wonder if the realised the entire website has become the most unbearable AI slop imaginable and if they don't do anything about it they won't have any real humans reading posts, just agents trying to advertise to each other.
        • hankbond 13 hours ago
          Next up, LinkedIn starts using this feedback to train a classifier. They then announce an officially approved "not slop" classification only for LinkedIn Gold member posts. The classified posts have a wider reach due to everyone filtering out AI slop. Non-members automatically get bucketed in with the slop bc they don't pay to have the verified classifier run on them.
          • serf 11 hours ago
            seems like at that point it'd be a bigger benefit for LinkedIn to provide the one and only model trained to subvert the human capability to detect slop using that new negative corpus.

            then we're all screwed I guess. lol

        • physix 13 hours ago
          Better would have been to offer a button to flag something that does NOT seem like AI slop on LinkedIn.
        • Oras 12 hours ago
          If there is an action on AI slop on LI, it will end up with almost no posts at all
      • trollbridge 13 hours ago
        Sign up for Pangram and install the browser extension; covers X, Reddit, and Substack, and more to come.
      • leawi 9 hours ago
        Recently, I wrote a small script for myself that scrapes the comments to see if anyone already said it's AI, and if so, grays out the article...
    • arjie 13 hours ago
      Cloudflare blogs are not meant to be human-read, AFAIK. They're raw material meant to be fed into an agent to be filtered down. I rarely read the contents because they are usually word-expanded to a greater degree than an article from The Atlantic.
      • dgellow 12 hours ago
        That’s disappointing, in the past cloudflare had some of the best engineering blog articles
        • arjie 12 hours ago
          I don't disagree, but at some point in the last year they ended up severely word-expanded. So in a revealed sense, they are no longer meant for human consumption except for those who don't significantly value their own time. There is very little information in the post that an agent can't pull for you:

          * they use quantized models

          * they quantize KV cache

          * they have a cache tagging mechanism to prevent cache misuse (neat)

          The agent can extract numbers without filler prose as well.

    • mrkstu 12 hours ago
      I'm getting somewhat conflicted. There is a Twitter account I follow that has great takes and lots of deeply personal posts... BUT he obviously uses an LLM in his writing pipeline somewhere. Too many AIisms scattered about to ignore.

      I'm not thrilled with it, but he is obviously using it to improve his writing overall- to communicate some great ideas that are personal and germane. I've decided that being too inflexible serves no one. If it is true slop, I'll not revisit the writer in the future- if they are using AI to polish writing that at its core is a unique voice, I'll accept it and learn to live with it...

    • TacticalCoder 11 hours ago
      > “It's worth being precise about where the benefit comes from, because it isn't raw speed.“

      What's funny it's that is as if AI "learned" to speak english but not really. People simply don't speak using those strange constructs: those sentences sound a bit like if a "Karen" was trying to make a point.

      What's scary, to me, as a dev using AI, is that those LLMs do the same thing with code: it looks like proper code, but it really ain't so once you dig a bit.

      It's verbose and doesn't add anything: it's just infinite verbiage / sloppy-pasta.

      Crazy thing though it's that it's 2026 and apparently devs can't be bothered to copy/paste their sloppy-pasta LLMish into a de-sloppifier before publishing blog posts.

    • colingauvin 12 hours ago
      Came here to comment this.
    • buttonpusherr 9 hours ago
      I hope you can get over it, because before long literally everything will be written by AI. Millions of people write with this every day.
      • lelanthran 4 hours ago
        That makes human written content even more valuable to advertisers.

        After all, why would advertisers want to advertise to bots? This whole sentiment of "You'all need to allow my bot postings in your group" is getting tiresome. There's plenty of places where your bot can talk to other bots, publish for other bots, etc.

      • mrtesthah 7 hours ago
        Sounds like a great way to filter out all the pointless garbage on the internet.
  • lostmsu 12 hours ago
    So they quantize models, only tell about it in the blog post (instead of a warning on the model page), and even in the blog post pretend there's no difference by benchmarking on small context tasks many of which are saturated. Coding agents will probably be severely negatively affected by KV quantization.

    I'd say serving quantized models without saying so on the "store" page is fraud.

    • whimsicalism 10 hours ago
      don't disagree, but there is a big difference between 'quantized model/weights' and quantized activations
  • runtime_lens 18 minutes ago
    [flagged]
  • magenta4 3 hours ago
    [dead]