Assertion certainty 4/5 debate potential 1/5

Parakhin: Shopify runs a 300M parameter Liquid model under 30ms for search

Mikhail Parakhin · AI-Native Engineering: 100% adoption, 5x search throughput, unlimited tokens — Mikhail Parakhin · Apr 22, 2026 · at 1:01:53

Shopify CTO Mikhail Parakhin explains how Shopify deploys Liquid AI models into production for real-time search query parsing and personalization.

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“We run it at 30 milliseconds, a tiny model, like three hundred million parameters, In, but we run it in 30 milliseconds end to end for search when you type a query, and then we produce all the possible things with what you can mean by that query and some, you know not only synonyms, but kind of full query understanding that the whole tree of what you might need and including your personal personalization, because you might have done like previous queries and lowering it all down into The search server, so that the requirements on latency, obviously, they're very very strict. So, so then we are able to run it under 30 milliseconds”

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