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Models
Model routing
Sending different requests to different model tiers based on difficulty or stakes.
Model routing classifies each request and sends it to the smallest model that can handle it. Easy classification → small model. Standard chat → mid-tier. Hard reasoning, novel reasoning, multi-step planning → frontier. Done well, routing cuts production AI bills 50-70% with no quality loss. The router is itself usually a small model or a deterministic classifier.
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