Controlling AI inference costs at scale in production

Short summary

AI inference costs frequently grow 5-10x when scaling from development to production, with Gartner reporting estimation errors of 500-1000%. Solutions: route simple tasks to cheaper models, track costs per feature/endpoint, and build cost observability into your pipeline. Inference now drives 55% of AI infrastructure spend (expected 70-80% by year-end).

• •Inference costs grow 5-10x in production; $200k budgets can become $2M
• •Route simple tasks to cheaper models; reserve large models for complex problems
• •Build cost observability by tracking spend per user, feature, and endpoint

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