Definition
The architectural practice of minimizing the financial expenditure of RAG pipelines and AI agents by optimizing token density, implementing semantic caching, and utilizing model routing to balance inference quality against API and infrastructure costs.
Refers specifically to LLM token consumption and vector database egress, not general business accounting.
"A hybrid engine that switches between an electric motor for city driving (cheap, small tasks) and a gas engine for the highway (expensive, complex reasoning)."
- Semantic Caching(Component)
- Model Routing(Component)
- Small Language Models (SLMs)(Component)
- Tokenization(Prerequisite)
Conceptual Overview
The architectural practice of minimizing the financial expenditure of RAG pipelines and AI agents by optimizing token density, implementing semantic caching, and utilizing model routing to balance inference quality against API and infrastructure costs.
Disambiguation
Refers specifically to LLM token consumption and vector database egress, not general business accounting.
Visual Analog
A hybrid engine that switches between an electric motor for city driving (cheap, small tasks) and a gas engine for the highway (expensive, complex reasoning).