Together AI: Inference Costs Rising with AI Adoption

AI Impact Summary

The core challenge for AI-native teams is the shift from model training to efficient inference at scale, which now accounts for 80-90% of the total cost of a production AI system. Together AI highlights that inference costs have dropped dramatically (280-fold) since 2022, but as costs fall, the overall volume of inference requests increases, driving up infrastructure spend. Optimizing this full stack – hardware, software, and scheduling – is critical for maintaining margins and enabling growth for AI-native applications.