Speeding up LLMs for travel applications: Medusa plus knowledge distillation

Combining knowledge distillation with the Medusa framework lets a 1.1B-parameter TinyLlama student match the quality of its 70B-parameter Llama-3.1 teacher while running 10 to 20 times as fast at less than one-third the cost. Working with Booking.com on AI Trip Planner, Smart Filters and accommodation description generation, the pipeline closed over 90% of the quality gap and added 2 to 3.6x further speedup from Medusa heads.