Symbol Q^*_distill
istill is part of the quantity the equation computes from the expression on the right.
Read this term in its guide →Published equation contexts
Why this formula appears here
As a worked illustration only, not a claim about any real company’s ledger: take Alpaca’s disclosed $600 and assume, as an order-of-magnitude figure 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: the pipeline cost is a rounding…
Read the representative guide
How to interpret it
Its accuracy depends on the assumptions and range of use described in the article. Read it with the definitions, units, and assumptions supplied by the article.
Research cited beside this formula
Published contexts (1)
A symbol can carry a different meaning in another article. Each occurrence keeps its own guide and term definitions.
Equation 8 · Edge AI & Electronics
The Real Economics of Shipping a Model to a Device
This equation gives an approximation: it relates the quantities while allowing an approximation.
As a worked illustration only, not a claim about any real company’s ledger: take Alpaca’s disclosed $600 and assume, as an order-of-magnitude figure 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: the pipeline cost is a rounding…
Equation guide → · Article →