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Concept

Cost Equalization

The heuristic that when total cost is a sum of competing terms with power-law shapes, the minimum tends to sit where the terms are roughly equal — surprisingly load-bearing for back-of-envelope reasoning about training vs. inference.

Tensions

It is a rule of thumb, not a theorem, and "equal" can mean 50/50 or 33/33/33 depending on how many cost terms you split into. The looseness is fine because the underlying inputs (traffic forecasts, model lifetimes) carry order-of-magnitude error bars themselves.

Related Concepts

scaling laws | Chinchilla scaling | inference economics

Last updated: May 17, 2026