Cost
With so many distinct, complex, and potentially expensive moving parts, it is critical for engineers to know the costs of their GenAI application and how to contain these costs. While you will learn more about cost optimization strategies in Chapter 12, Correcting and Optimizing Your Generative AI Application, this section will serve as an introduction to understanding the financial costs of GenAI applications, which are in some ways different from web development applications.
Types of costs
When using GenAI, costs can arise from several different areas. These costs can be broadly categorized into computational, storage, data acquisition, development, and maintenance costs:
- Training costs: Training GenAI models requires significant computational resources. This is especially true for large models such as GPT-4. These resources often include graphics processing units (GPUs) or tensor processing units (TPUs), which are optimized for parallel processing tasks. The...
