Latency, Cost, Accuracy: The Unavoidable Triangle of GenAI
Published
•1 min read
Every production AI system faces the same constraint:
You can optimize two.
Never all three.
Fast + Accurate = Expensive
High-end models with large context windows.
Great answers.
High cloud bills.
Cheap + Fast = Low Quality
Small models.
Minimal retrieval.
Surface-level outputs.
Cheap + Accurate = Slow
Heavy retrieval.
Multi-step reasoning.
Long response times.
Architectural Implications
This triangle drives:
Model selection
Caching strategies
RAG depth
Agent complexity
Ignoring it leads to unrealistic expectations.
Final Thought
Every GenAI product is an economic decision disguised as a technical one.
