Right-Sizing Intelligence: From Cloudonomics to Tokenomics
Here’s a pattern I keep seeing in teams building with LLMs. An engineering team adopts AI. They pick a frontier model — Opus, GPT-5.4, whatever’s top of the leaderboard. It works. They ship. Every task runs through it. JSON extraction. Summarization. Classification. Multi-step reasoning. All of it. The problem wasn’t a wrong choice. It was no choice at all. If you’ve been in cloud long enough, you recognize this. It’s 2012 again. Running an m5.16xlarge for a cron job. The bill arrives. You feel it. ...