Async and Hogwild! Inference

Speculative decoding (Phase 10 · 15) parallelizes tokens within one sequence. Multi-agent frameworks parallelize across whole sequences but force explicit coordination (voting, sub-task splitting). Hogwild! Inference (Rodionov et al., arXiv:2504.06261) does something else: run N instances of the same LLM in parallel against a SHARED key-value cache. Each worker sees every other worker's generated tokens instantly. Modern reasoning models — QwQ, DeepSeek-R1 — can self-coordinate through that shared cache without any fine-tuning. The approach is experimental but it opens an entirely new axis of inference parallelism that sits orthogonal to spec decode. This lesson implements a two-worker Hogwild! simulator in stdlib Python and explains why the shared-cache collaboration emerges from the existing model's reasoning abilities.