Should You Be Distilling Your Own Model?
$87,000 vs roughly $1,000. Those were our first estimates for processing a corpus of 6.5 million semantic atoms with Sonnet or training and running a smaller model ourselves. I was ready to build the smaller model. Our job was narrow. We needed to read financial text and record who said what, what they claimed, and how certain the source was. A wrong speaker or an invented certainty would become…
The comparison between the costs of distilling your own model versus renting an API model highlights an important decision point for machine learning projects. While distilling a model may offer potential advantages, it also comes with additional engineering and operational costs that were not fully quantified in the initial analysis. The decision to opt for renting an API model ultimately proves to be the more cost-effective choice, especially for this specific extraction stage task.
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