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Equation 37 · Part 8 · The Real Economics of Shipping a Model to a Device

subtraction

Qdevice∗=(Cdev+U)/(ccloud−cd)Q^{*}_{\mathrm{device}} = (C_{\mathrm{dev}} + U) / (c_{\mathrm{cloud}} - c_{d})
subtraction

What this part means

Subtract the following term or group from the preceding one. A leading minus marks a negative quantity.

Its job in the formula

Subtract the following term or group from the preceding one. A leading minus marks a negative quantity.

The passage around this formula

The marginal-cost argument for on-device inference is not wrong; it is one term in a four-term equation, and the other three — variant-matrix engineering, distillation-versus-teacher economics, and update-distribution bandwidth — are each individually documented at real, checkable magnitudes in this article. Distillation itself is nearly always worth doing: disclosed training runs in the hundreds of dollars clear their own break-even point against even modest cloud query volumes almost immediately. Placing the result on a device is a separate, harder calculation, one that rises with every additional tier a release has to validate and every device already in the field that has to receive the…

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Learn the underlying idea

Addition combines quantities; subtraction measures the signed difference between them. Parentheses show what is combined before the rest of the expression is evaluated.

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The article lists its research sources here.