Equation 1 · Part 3 · The Real Economics of Shipping a Model to a Device

Symbol Q

TC_{\mathrm{distill}} = C_{\mathrm{distill}} + Q \cdot c_{\mathrm{student}},

Q

What this part means

the number of queries served over the deployment’s life, and $c_{\mathrm{student}}$ .

Its job in the formula

Q is one of the signed contributions combined to compute the quantity on the left.

Full expressionSymbol QArticle meaning

Where the article explains it

Here $C_{\mathrm{distill}}$ is the one-time training cost, Q is the number of queries served over the deployment’s life, and $c_{\mathrm{student}}$ and $c_{\mathrm{teacher}}$ are the marginal cost per query of serving each model, wherever that serving happens.

The passage around this formula

That gap explains why distillation investment almost never fails its own break-even test once a product actually ships. Write the total cost of training and then serving a distilled student model as $TC_{\mathrm{distill}} = C_{\mathrm{distill}} + Q \cdot c_{\mathrm{student}}$ . against the cost of simply continuing to serve the teacher directly for the same query volume,

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Learn the underlying idea

A variable is a named place for a value. Its letter is a local label: x can mean position in one formula and a data point in another.

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Sources cited in the article section

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