Inference Efficiency as Capability

If capability is a function of inference budget, then cutting the cost of a token is capability work: Gemma 4's five levers (37.5% KV-cache reduction via keys-as-values + p-RoPE, QAT to sub-GB, MTP drafter heads, MoE, encoder removal) buy more thinking per dollar — Kimi K3 runs the same logic at the opposite pole, where 3.7% activation sparsity, hybrid linear attention and MXFP4 QAT are what make a 2.8T open model servable at all, and Gemini 3.5 Flash-Lite shows the efficiency *tier* moving the other way: a full agentic-capability tier bought with a 67% output-price rise, so that per-dollar the release is a gain on some benchmarks and a loss on others