Lesson 2027 of 2116
AI Model Routing: Picking the Right Model Per Request Automatically
A router sends each request to the cheapest model that can handle it. Done well, it cuts costs in half.
Lesson map
What this lesson covers
Learning path
The main moves in order
- 1The premise
- 2routing
- 3classifier
- 4cascade
Concept cluster
Terms to connect while reading
Section 1
The premise
Routers classify requests by complexity and dispatch to the right model — small for easy, big for hard, with fallback on low confidence.
What AI does well here
- Classify intent and route by tier
- Cascade: try cheap first, escalate on failure
- Centralize fallback when a vendor has an outage
- Monitor per-route quality drift
What AI cannot do
- Route well without good classification examples
- Replace eval discipline on every route
- Hide the added latency of classification + cascade
- Save money if every request escalates anyway
Key terms in this lesson
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