Cool approach, i think less latency and cost is the way to go.
Here's how this would have likely been made.
- Tiny transformer or equivalent model (maybe a few bn or so?), explaining latency and cost
- Questions are sent in parallel to multiple copies of it (I'm sure they're edge located)
- The model is post-trained for calibration in a wide variety of data (the recipe is relatively simple, and likely targeted on distillation of logprobs / confidence of a bigger model)
Notice how cost is ONLY for input tokens as output is merely numbers (few tokens) because input could be huge (questions and options).
At 0.042-per-million price they have, Astra estimates the model to be 3bn parameters.
One could replicate this by post training Qwen 3.5 2Bn. I expect people to do so soon!
I'm trying to understand what difference does this make over LLMs.
LLMs are universal simulators, their latents model the world. So I bet if you compare their logprobs with probabilities output by this model, it will be highly correlated.
Someone should do this quick experiment. I bet there won't be enough of a meaningful difference.
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