Making LLMs Cheaper and Better via Performance-Efficiency Optimized Routing
(arxiv.org)121 points by omarsar 17 hours ago
121 points by omarsar 17 hours ago
It seems they use 70% of the benchmark query-answer pairs to cluster and determine which models work best for each cluster (by sending all queries to all models and looking at responses vs ground truth answers). Then they route the remaining 30% "test" set queries according to those prior determinations. It doesn't seem surprising that this approach would give you Pareto efficiency on those benchmarks.
I’m fascinated by this new paradigm. We’ve more or less perfected Mixture-of-Experts inside a single model, where routing happens between subnetworks. What GPT-5 auto (and this paper) are doing is a step further: “LLM routing” across multiple distinct models. It’s still rough right now, but it feels inevitable that this will get much better over time.
> It’s still rough right now, but it feels inevitable that this will get much better over time.
Yeah, the signals they get will improve things over time. You can do a lot of heavy lifting with embedding models nowadays, get "satisfaction" signals from chats, and adjust your router based on those. It will be weird at first, some people will complain, but at the end of the day, you don't need imo-gold levels of thinking to write a fitness plan that most likely the user won't even follow :)
Signal gathering is likely the driver of most of the subsidised model offerings we see today.
I wish this could be exploited even further, where a big model could be built with a network of a lot of small, specialized, models
And then maybe you could just customize and optimize your own mode for local use. Almost like mixing and matching different modules. It would be nice to have a model that only knows and does what you need it to
A Team-as-a-Service? Would be interesting to be able to create a Python script acting like a team of sales, project management, and engineering working together with telemetry and KPIs dashboard on top. If not to deliver anything useful then as a project management frameworks learning tool.
I'd actually bet against this. The "bitter lesson" suggests doing things end-to-end in-model will (eventually, with sufficient data) outcompete building things outside of models.
My understanding is that GPT5 already does this by varying the quantity of CoT done (in addition to the kind of super-model-level routing described in the post), and I strongly suspect it's only going to get more sophisticated
I mean, agentic workflows have been a thing for a while now, this is just agentic chat.
Link to repo for those interested: https://github.com/ZhangYiqun018/AvengersPro
That's almost the most simple kind of router imaginable, isn't it? Just embed the query and route to the model that in the past has performed the best on similar queries?
I'm sure that has been documented/tried before, and this almost certainly doesn't work in practice. The typical counter-example would be to take a simple-sounding query that actually requires complex reasoning, but because the query is close in the embedding space to other simple-sounding queries, it would be sent to a "dumber model" for efficency.
I guess in their benchmarks that works out, because from what it sounds like, they do per-dataset clustering, so the embedding clusters may actually be able to cluster "complexity levels". However, if you were to mix all datasets into one (similar to how you would encounter it for most real-world use-cases) and cluster against that, this approach would surely break down.
Essentially, instead of modifying the prompt itself, the system intelligently directs the prompt to the LLM that is best suited to handle it based on its learned performance and efficiency characteristics for similar types of queries. It's externally optimizing people's prompts.
Between these kinds of optimizations, improved data center efficiency, and smaller models being more capable, I wonder how long it will be before someone manages to make a profitable AI business. Maybe when they race to train better models slows down and they don't need to constantly upgrade capacity.
AGI will not be a single model. It will be an ensemble of models that interact with each other. Just like different parts of your brain.
Reminds me of the early days of cloud computing. It was very pricey, but once the tools caught up in 5 or so years, it went from "omg cloud is so expensive" to "omg cloud is only expensive when its worth building your own data center"
Paper and repo do not mention routing latency, which I think is a concern.
Also the paper has some pie chart crimes on page 6.
Just from a brief look at the repo they seem to be doing semantic embeddings w/ Qwen3-Embedding-8B, which should be in the high thousands pp t/s on recent hardware. With a sufficiently large dataset after using it for a while you could probably fine-tune a smaller model as well (4B and 0.6B available from the same family)
Wow, that was fast.
I've thought for a while that ensembling approaches would become the next stage of LLM development after CoT, since it provides yet another effective, independent axis for scaling laws. Great to see that perspective is taking off. The open weight community has an opportunity to take these ideas and run with them better than OpenAI has.