In the AI industry, we borrowed the term “efficient frontier” from economists. We use it to talk about managing tradeoffs, most often the tradeoff between cost and capabilities for models. A model is a “frontier model” if it offers the highest degree of intelligence at a given cost or size. We also have efficient frontiers in inference engineering. Most often, this is expressed as a tradeoff between latency and throughput (which determines cost), though we can also exchange quality for throughput (via quantization, distillation, and pruning) or intelligence for speed (in the form of reasoning