> speculative decoding is a great boon, but mostly for large labs hosting and serving many requests at once, and maybe not so effective for local inference

This is somewhat of a nitpicking point, but AIUI speculative decoding is worthwhile if (1) you have viable unexploited parallelism that can speed up the "verify" step compared to plain decode, and (2) it's profitable for you to load complete model layers into memory in bulk, not just a tiny fraction of active parameters. (2) tends to be true for large hosters, but not only, e.g. if you're running inference on a large dense model (think Mistral Medium) with SSD streaming and a single session (no concurrent batching), speculative decoding can be quite great.

It's also a spectrum, e.g. some MoE models are not very sparse and comparatively few concurrent requests might already span most of the experts, such that loading a complete set of layer parameters and doing speculative decoding to increase compute intensity actually becomes worthwhile.