The Model Decision: Optimizing Cost, Control, & Speed

About Crusoe AI Talks: No product pitches, just a panel and audience of AI leaders working through training and inference decisions, architectural choices, and strategic bets. Expect technical depth and honest takes in an entrepreneurial atmosphere. Special Guest Speakers: Every team building on AI faces the same decision: call a closed frontier model, run and customize on open models, or train something proprietary. The right answer depends on where you are in the lifecycle. This panel puts companies - like Nous Research and OpenRouter - who have answered that question differently in conversation with each other. We’ll discuss what each one runs today and how they got there. Each path trades off differently on cost, control, performance, and speed to ship, and the calculus keeps shifting as both closed and open models improve. There's no consensus answer, and that's exactly what makes it worth discussing in public. What to expect: