Featured Project
The seven-layer tokenomics stack
Open a layer to see what it controls
L6
Demand + entry points
sets the demand
Where consumption starts: who or what is asking, through which interface, for which use case, and with what inputs. Every layer beneath serves the demand this one creates.
Lever: set requirements per use case; trim and reuse context.
L5
AI access + control
bounds fan-out and retries
The governed entry point in front of every model: admission, pass-through proxying, routing, policy and guardrails, and attribution. It is the only layer that can decide a request needs no model at all, and the only one that can stop a workload consuming without limit.
Lever: complexity routing; budgets; agent caps.
L4
Model management + selection
right-sizes what runs
Which model runs, from which provider and region, with what runtime configuration and adapted weights, chosen from a catalog of capabilities, pricing, latency, and quality. Running a frontier-scale model for a trivial task is the classic waste.
Lever: right-size the model; configure the runtime; adapt.
L3
Inference stack
suppresses repeated work
The serving software and the runtime around it: engine, batching, KV and semantic caches, session memory, tool calls, runtime safety checks, and the agent loop that plans, calls, and calls again. Usually the single largest source of optimization, and the first layer where consumption is suppressed rather than merely priced.
Lever: right engine; prefix, KV, and semantic cache; disaggregation.
L2
Infrastructure management
sets effective cost
How much of that hardware does useful work. Idle capacity raises the effective cost of the work that does run.
Lever: batch the troughs; autoscale; pool and share GPUs.
L1
Physical infrastructure
sets cost per token
The accelerator and its generation, with the memory, interconnect, cooling, and density it ships with, and the regions and availability zones it runs in. This is the equipment and location that turn power into tokens.
Lever: match accelerator class to workload; adopt newer generations; place by region.
L0
Energy
sets the price of power
The electricity and water a data center takes in, from the point they enter the facility: what supply is contracted, what it costs, how much the connection can deliver, and the water that cooling consumes.
Lever: site by delivered power price and capacity; contract supply; shift deferrable work in time.
Featured Project
Big-T Notation
Big-O for AI. A shared language for how token consumption grows as usage scales.
T(1)
Constant. The model is not called per request — a cache hit, a static lookup.
cache and precompute
T(log n)
Sublinear. Deterministic code shrinks the input before the model sees it.
filter before inference
T(n)
Linear. One model call per request — the healthy default.
trim per-call overhead
T(n·k)
Multiplicative. k model calls per request, and k is usually invisible.
compose tool pipelines
T(n·k·a)
Agent-multiplicative. An orchestrator spawns sub-agents that spawn tool calls.
bound depth, add budgets
T(∞)
Unbounded. Loops with no termination condition.
hard termination. always.
T(n · k · a) n = requests or input size · k = model calls per request · a = agent depth