You need the next token to begin the next decode. So if you can get what might be the next token in half the time, you can kick off the next decode before the true decode for this token has finished.

If the draft was wrong you can kill the speculative decode, and you haven’t lost anything except for idle time

It’s true we can’t show the user the token until we have the true decode finished, but we can launch more work internally before we’re certain