#cost
7 articles
01
·Agents·★ MEMBER·PAPER·12 min read
Paper Walkthrough: EarlyEval — Making Agent Evaluation Cheaper by Stopping Early
One evaluation pass over an agentic benchmark costs hundreds of dollars. EarlyEval exploits the fact that an agent's ending is legible from its middle, halting runs to cut 13–26% of steps. Mechanism, numbers, and limits, straight from the paper.
02
·Large Language Models·★ MEMBER·PAPER·13 min read
Paper walkthrough: Puro-2B — pretraining a 2B model from scratch for $6.9K on consumer GPUs
A team ran 1.4 trillion tokens of pretraining on gaming GPUs and reached Qwen2-1.5B-level quality for roughly $4.4K. Here is the cost structure, the FP8 accounting, the effective learning rate, and the curriculum averaging — from first principles.
03
·Inference & Serving·★ MEMBER·10 min read
Prompt Caching and Context Design — One Prefix Rule That Moves Your Bill by an Order of Magnitude
Are you paying to have the same system prompt re-read on every single request? Prompt caching only works on exact prefixes — and that one rule decides what goes where in your context. Why a single timestamp at the top wipes out everything below it, and how misreading the TTL can make caching 25% more expensive than not caching at all.
04
·Inference & Serving·★ MEMBER·11 min read
Cutting Inference Cost in Practice — What to Do First
Quantization and distillation both work, but in most shops there are two or three levers left that cost you nothing in quality. Break the bill into four numbers, then reorder the work: cache, batch, shorten, compress. What each lever actually buys, and what breaks when you take them out of order.
05
·Cloud & Ops·FREE·10 min read
Serverless and Cost Design — Cloud That Won't Bankrupt You
"Pay for what you use" also means "pay for what someone else uses of you." Starting from zero, this piece builds up scale-to-zero, the GB-second billing unit, and the accident patterns that make a bill grow exponentially — ending with a kill switch you can actually design into your own project.
06
·Cloud & Ops·★ MEMBER·10 min read
The Economics of GPU Cloud — Rent, Buy, or Commit
The same GPU carries four prices at once. Put on-demand, committed, spot, and owned hardware on a single equation: the break-even utilization, the true cost of spot once interruptions are priced in, the commitment burn rate, and the line items that never appear on the rate card.
07
·Scaling & Power·★ MEMBER·10 min read
The Economics of Chiplets — We Split Dies Because We Cannot Build Them Big
Chips are split into chiplets not because splitting is faster but because a single large die cannot be built at a price anyone will pay. The reticle limit, the exponential in yield, cost per good die, the point where splitting starts to lose money, mixing process nodes, and UCIe as a standard for the seam.