Equation 7 · Part 1 · The Real Economics of Shipping a Model to a Device
Symbol Q^*_distill
What this part means
the break-even query volume.
Its job in the formula
istill is part of the quantity the equation computes from the expression on the right.
Full expression→Symbol Q^*_distill→Article meaning
Where the article explains it
The break-even query volume is
The passage around this formula
…consistent with how frontier and compact API tiers are typically priced relative to each other, that a teacher-class model costs $0.002 per query to serve and a well-distilled student costs $0.0002 — a tenfold gap. Then = 600 / 0.0018 333{,}000 queries. Any production feature serving that many requests clears the investment in days, sometimes hours. This is the arithmetic reason distillation has become the default route to a deployable small model rather than a research curiosity:…
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A subscript is a label attached below a symbol. It often selects a time step, component, category, or member of a sequence.
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Sources cited in the surrounding passage
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