Developer reports 50–100× faster Kokoro TTS model
A Reddit developer reports distilling Kokoro TTS into a model that runs 50–100 times faster, though the post includes no independent benchmark or corroborating measurement. The author says the training took roughly a day on an RTX 4070 Ti Super and credits Sahil with showing him the initial distillation idea, but says he does not understand exactly how the optimization works.
The post presents a potentially significant consumer-GPU TTS optimization, but its claimed speedup remains an unverified single-source report.
My thinking was models, esp Opus 5.5 can just hill-climb as long as you give them something achievable and a clear metric to improve on. So here's something I don't even have a clue how it exactly works.
The training itself happened in my basement 4070ti super over a day or so.
And yes I know its Opus slop, but still really cool how things I never thought possible unless you're an ML engineer is available to a run of the mill web-dev guy.
Thanks to this tweet from Sahil for even showing how the initial idea worked to distill Kokoro in the first place. https://x.com/sahilmdkr/status/2112212041045889409
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