Why local inference is inefficient: moving weights costs ~100x more than computing

cis_female · x · 2026-10-30

A concise explainer on why local inference is inefficient: running a model requires shipping weights from memory to the processor, which costs 100x more than the inference computation itself due to physics. With 100 users sharing, weights are moved once and computed 100 times, cutting cost by 50x — the physics behind batch/cloud inference's cost advantage.

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