Serving Optimizations

1. The Menu, Organized by Where It Works

Interviewers ask some version of "this is too slow and too expensive, what do you do?" What they want back is a menu, not a monologue. Picture that menu as three shelves. The top shelf holds optimizations that avoid calling the big model at all. The middle shelf holds optimizations inside the serving engine, the software that actually runs the model. The bottom shelf holds optimizations that change what the model computes. Learn them in that order, top shelf first, because avoiding a call beats accelerating one every time.