Stage 1 · Lesson 3 of 6
The cheapest model that is good enough
The goal is not the smartest model. It is the cheapest and fastest model that clears your quality bar for this task. A model that is 2% better but ten times the price is usually the wrong choice for sorting support tickets, and the right choice for reviewing a legal contract.
A sensible order is: prove the feature works with a strong model, write down what "good enough" means as , then try smaller models against the same cases and while quality holds. Many products end up using two or three models: a small one for most requests and a strong one for the hard ones. Keep this idea in mind through every later stage.
A question to check yourself, an AI practice session and 2 cheat sheet entries come with the full roadmap. Unlock
Resources for this stage
Start with· follow one of these
- CoursePaidGrokking Modern AI Fundamentals
Design Gurus · Beginner · $72 one-time
A structured grounding in how models, tokens and embeddings work before you compare them
- GuideFreeApplied LLMs: What We Learned From a Year of Building
Yan, Bartolo, Fu and others · Advanced
Free: practitioners on starting with a strong model, then measuring before you step down