FrugalGPT: How to Use Large Language Models While Reducing Cost and
  Improving Performance
Lingjiao Chen Matei Zaharia James Zou
There is a rapidly growing number of large language models (LLMs) that users
can query for a fee. We review the cost associated with querying popular LLM
APIs, e.g. GPT-4, ChatGPT, J1-Jumbo, and find that these models have
heterogeneous pricing structures, with fees that can differ by two orders of
magnitude. In particular, using LLMs on large collections of queries and text
can be expensive. Motivated by this, we outline and discuss three types of
strategies that users can exploit to reduce the inference cost associated with
using LLMs: 1) prompt adaptation, 2) LLM approximation, and 3) LLM cascade. As
an example, we propose FrugalGPT, a simple yet flexible instantiation of LLM
cascade which learns which combinations of LLMs to use for different queries in
order to reduce cost and improve accuracy. Our experiments show that FrugalGPT
can match the performance of the best individual LLM (e.g. GPT-4) with up to
98% cost reduction or improve the accuracy over GPT-4 by 4% with the same cost.
The ideas and findings presented here lay a foundation for using LLMs
sustainably and efficiently.