I'm a Senior Machine Learning Engineer from Athens, Greece. I design and implement efficient AI/ML systems, focusing on open-source technologies across environments, on the cloud, and at the edge.
Imagine you could effortlessly navigate the universe of LLMs, always knowing which one is the perfect fit for your specific query. Today, this is a very difficult challenge. So, how do you efficiently manage and use LLMs for various tasks? This is where LLM Routing emerges as a crucial strategy.
New state-of-the-art models emerge every few weeks, making it hard to keep up, especially when testing and integrating them. In reality, many available models may already meet our needs. The key question isn’t “Which model is the best?” but rather, “What’s the smallest model that gets the job done?”
A typical user may be building a summarization application for their domain and wondering: “Do I need to go for a model as big as DeepSeek, or can I get away with a smaller model?”. This takes us to the key elements: Metrics, Models, and Datasets.
Previously, we explored how LLMs like Meta’s Llama reshaped AI, offering transparency and control. We discussed open-weight models like DeepSeek and deployment options. Now, we show how to deploy DeepSeek V3, a powerful open-weight model, on a Kubernetes cluster using vLLM.