Inference (AI)

In recruiter context

Training a model is a one-time (or quarterly) cost. Inference is what you pay for every time a user hits the feature. At scale, inference cost dominates the AI budget — and it's where production engineering has the most leverage. The cost levers in 2026: model routing (run smaller cheaper models on easy queries, route hard queries to frontier models), prompt caching, response caching for repeated queries, shorter outputs via prompt engineering, fine-tuning a smaller model when volume justifies it, and batch inference where latency permits. ML Engineers and AI Engineers regularly cut production inference cost 50-70% via model routing alone.