Free Lesson
How To Use Open Models Effectively
Part of AI Product Engineering
30 min
Jul 24, 2026 2:00 PM
Virtual (Zoom)
In this video
What you'll learn
Know when open models pay off
Walk through the economics. Where open models match frontier quality, where they do not, and how the math changes as your token volume grows.
Route the right work to the right model
Run most requests on a cheaper open model and save frontier models for the hard cases. We cover the latency and throughput tradeoffs that decide what runs where.
Get started without the footguns
Which inference engine to reach for first, how to think about the serving ecosystem, and the mistakes that make teams quit on open models too early.
Why this topic matters
Frontier model prices keep climbing while open models keep getting better. For many types of production work an open model is good enough, and switching can cut your bill without hurting quality. Zach has taught thousands of engineers to run these models. He will show you when open models are the right call, and how to put them to work.
You'll learn from
Zach Mueller
Head of Developer Relations at Lambda (ex-Hugging Face)
Hamel Husain
ML Engineer with 20+ years of experience