Simon Willison’s Weblog

20th February 2026 - Link Blog

Taalas serves Llama 3.1 8B at 17,000 tokens/second (via) This new Canadian hardware startup just announced their first product - a custom hardware implementation of the Llama 3.1 8B model (from July 2024) that can run at a staggering 17,000 tokens/second.

I was going to include a video of their demo but it's so fast it would look more like a screenshot. You can try it out at chatjimmy.ai.

They describe their Silicon Llama as “aggressively quantized, combining 3-bit and 6-bit parameters.” Their next generation will use 4-bit - presumably they have quite a long lead time for baking out new models!