The efficient frontier of LLM inference

• In the AI industry, we borrowed the term “efficient frontier” from economists.
• We use it to talk about managing tradeoffs, most often the tradeoff between cost and capabilities for models.
• A model is a “frontier model” if it offers the highest degree of intelligence at a given cost or size.✕An efficient frontier shows the range of optimal combinations when trading off between two valuable outcomes in a resource-constrained environment.