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Model Routing and Cascades

Choose a model against measured task quality, latency and cost. Distinguish routing before generation from cascades that pay for a first answer before escalating.

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RELATED CONCEPTS

Request Routing and Load Balancing for LLMs Serving Benchmarks That Do Not Lie Cost per Million Tokens Multi-Tenancy, Quotas and Fair Share Tracing Inference Requests

LESSONS THAT TEACH THIS

Inference EngineeringSpeculation must repay the whole round19 min→Inference EngineeringRoute models before replicas22 min→

PRACTICE THIS IN REAL QUESTIONS

GPU & Accelerator ArchitectureHalf the weights are zero. Why did serving not get faster?→Open-Weights Models & Serving EnginesThree open-weights models could serve your product. How do you choose?→AI Infrastructure System DesignReview this eight-GPU inference design: what must change before it can meet its deadline?→Open-Weights Models & Serving EnginesYou serve a small, a medium and a large open-weights model. How do you route requests between them?→LLM Inference & ServingFirst-token latency is fast, but the reasoning model's answer takes seconds. What do you check?→Kubernetes, Slurm & GPU SchedulingOne fleet: training that wants every idle GPU, and inference with a p99 SLO. Separate pools, or one pool with preemption? Show the numbers.→