Originally published on AI Tech Connect.
Your router saved 60 per cent. At what quality cost? There is a sentence that gets said in a lot of engineering reviews, and it is always said with confidence: "we put a router in front of the models and inference spend dropped sixty per cent." It is usually true. It is also, on its own, meaningless — in exactly the way that "we made the database faster by deleting rows" is meaningless. You have described the saving and said nothing about what was given up to obtain it. The reason this passes unchallenged is structural rather than careless. Cost is measured for you. Every provider hands you a per-request cost, your gateway aggregates it, and the month-on-month drop is legible to anyone who can read a chart. Quality is not measured for you. Nobody sends you an invoice that says "this month…
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