Organizations often obsess over the cost of training GPUs (H100 clusters don't come cheap). But for successful products, training is a one-time (or periodic) cost. Inference runs 24/7/365.
The Inference Iceberg
Consider a traffic monitoring camera. It runs 30 FPS. That's 2.5 million inferences per day per camera. If you have 1,000 cameras, you are running 2.5 billion inferences daily. A model that is 10% less efficient isn't just slow; it's a million-dollar hole in your P&L.
Optimizing for the Edge
This is why model quantization and pruning aren't just "nice to haves"—they are economic necessities. We help clients profile their TCO early. Often, investing more in upfront data quality (LexRefine) allows you to use a smaller, faster model (e.g., YOLOv8-Nano instead of Large) to achieve the same accuracy. Better data = smaller model = lower inference cost.