The AI frontier has shifted from training cost to inference cost
skorusARK · x · 2026-07-20
The post argues that the AI frontier has moved through three phases:
- the smartest model at any cost
- the smartest model at the lowest training cost
- the smartest model at the lowest inference cost
It adds that open source changed the previous frontier by making very capable models cheap to train, but says the current race is different because inference economics now matter more.
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