Why GPTZero Switched to Groq: 7x Faster, 50% Lower Cost, 99% Accuracy

When GenAI exploded in 2023, the world got smarter. Almost overnight, students were writing essays with it, entrepreneurs were drafting business plans, developers were shipping code faster, and social feeds filled with AI-written posts. People everywhere were testing its limits.

But with that excitement came a new question: if machines can convincingly mimic human writing, how can people verify what is real and authentic? Authorship and trust were thrust into the spotlight and scrutinized more than ever. Teachers, journalists, and publishers all needed the same thing: clarity in a world suddenly filled with AI-generated text.

Two college friends, Edward Tian and Alex Cui, built the answer. The pair founded GPTZero and built a research prototype that could detect AI-generated writing. “We didn’t build GPTZero to stop AI, we built it to help people stay honest with it,” Alex explains.

And, what started as a small winter break project turned into a viral phenomenon. Within 48 hours, the tool went viral. Millions of users flooded the site, news outlets picked it up, and teachers, journalists, publishers, and admissions officers began sharing it across the globe.

From viral success to scaling stress

GPTZero was well on its way to accomplishing its mission to ensure that human-authored and AI-generated text remains distinguishable. Demand surged from classrooms, newsrooms, publishers and institutions across the world. The only problem? GPTZero’s rapid success was overwhelming their basic server infrastructure. Their models worked, but latency was compounding and server costs were skyrocketing. “At one point, a single server was handling over a million visits per day,” said Nazar Shmatko, Machine Learning Engineer at GPTZero. Real-time performance wasn’t just a nice-to-have, it was mission-critical.

GPTZero needed scale, reliability, and real-time performance, and they needed it fast.

Rebuilding for speed, scale, and trust

Previously GPTZero ran on OpenAI, but output speed and escalating latency could not keep up with customer expectations. To deliver fast output speeds and low-latency at scale, GPTZero switched to Groq to power their core GenAI workflows: Advanced AI Document Scanning, AI Writing Feedback, and AI Verification & Citation Checking.

GPTZero migrated the majority of their GenAI workloads to Groq, allowing them to run large models, like Meta’s Llama family (3.3 70B, 3.1 8B) and OpenAI’s open source models (GPT-OSS-120B, GPT-OSS-20B) with far greater speed and at lower cost. Combined, this capability delivers writing feedback, fact-checking, and credibility checks in parallel, without slowing down the user experience.

Fast inference that scales across workloads

Groq now powers the vast majority of GPTZero’s global GenAI inference workload, serving the parts of the platform that demand real-time generation, rewriting, and instant response. Shifting latency-sensitive features to Groq gives GPTZero a new competitive edge: delivering fast output at lower cost.

The impact started with their first major product feature, AI writing feedback: what once took 10–15 seconds on GPT-4o mini dropped to roughly two seconds after moving to Llama 3.1 8B, and Groq now supports more compute-intensive tasks, including explainability and AI prediction workloads on Llama 70B.

This performance foundation underpins GPTZero’s full document-analysis workflow. When a user uploads content, the system initiates a layered detection and verification process that scans for quality, evaluates claims, and determines the origin of each statement. The inference pipeline, spanning web servers, community signals, and specialized Python microservices, runs on Groq to power writing feedback, credibility checks, citation validation, and source discovery. Additionally, GPTZero is using Compound, Groq’s intelligent research agent. “We’re using Groq Compound in two stages— for fast search and fact-checking, and for a more thoughtful, resource-intensive review of facts and bibliographies,” Nazar shares.

The result is a set of trustworthy outputs that show what’s correct and verifiable, all delivered at real-time speeds. This same stack enables their advanced scan feature, which integrates every Groq-accelerated check into a fast, reliable experience for users.

7x faster and 50% lower cost, compared to OpenAI

GPTZero has grown from a viral prototype into a global-scale AI content detection platform trusted for real-time accuracy and reliability. Today, over 10 million users, 380,000 educators, and 3,000 institutions worldwide rely on GPTZero to verify the authenticity of written content.

With Groq, GPTZero gained a 7x improvement in end-to-end response time and lower time-to-first-token while reducing cost by 50% on an annualized basis. Powered by GroqCloud, the platform processes up to 20 million words per month in real time, enabling instant writing feedback with speed that holds under pressure.

With Groq, GPTZero can scale with confidence. Now, each new user adds predictable revenue instead of operational risk. From small scale experiments to production scale workloads, GPTZero counts on Groq for consistent performance without compromising intelligence or quality, and the result is a more sustainable, scalable model for continued global growth.

“We chose Groq because they deliver on three things that matter most: Speed, cost, and reliability,” said Alex.