The Truth About LLM Workloads: Why One-Size-Fits-All APIs Are Costing You Performance and Money

The Truth About LLM Workloads: Why One-Size-Fits-All APIs Are Costing You We hold this truth to be self-evident: not all workloads are created equal. But for large language models, this truth is far from universally acknowledged. Most organizations building LLM applications get their AI from an API. These APIs hide the varied costs and engineering trade-offs of distinct workloads behind deceptively simple per-token pricing. However, the truth will out. The era of model API dominance is ending. This shift is thanks to excellent work on open source models by organizations like DeepSeek and Alibaba Qwen, which erode the benefits of …