Semantic Model Routing
Definition
Semantic model routing reads each AI request and sends it to the model that handles it best for the lowest cost: simple, mechanical work to fast cheap models, hard reasoning to frontier models. It replaces the default of sending everything to the most expensive model in the building.
Most AI estates run on defaults: whichever model made the demo impressive handles everything forever after. The result is frontier prices for commodity work, because most enterprise traffic is classification, extraction and reformatting that a small model handles identically.
Routing makes the model choice a per-request decision owned by infrastructure rather than habit. On estates we run it is usually the single largest cost saving, and it works in both directions: it also stops cheap models grinding and retrying on work above their weight.
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