Agentic AI needs more than one model.
Agentic AI systems should route tasks across frontier and open models for cost efficiency.
“being able to build these agents that are able to use a system of models to address the problem at hand and do it most cost-effectively is going to benefit us”
A speaker at NVIDIA GTC articulated the case for heterogeneous model routing in agentic pipelines: use frontier models for complex planning, cheaper open models for tasks like summarization. This reflects a maturing engineering pattern in production AI systems where cost-efficiency drives architecture decisions. While not a novel concept, hearing it framed at GTC signals it is becoming mainstream infrastructure thinking rather than cutting-edge research.