Top AI engineers are shifting priorities: instead of optimizing compute costs, previously seen as the main barrier, the focus is now on deployment speed. As VentureBeat reported on November 7, 2025, for leading companies, the real constraints are becoming latency, flexibility, and available capacity. The article cites examples like Wonder (food delivery), where AI adds "mere cents" per order, but the company is more concerned with cloud capacity, and Recursion (biotech), which balances on-prem clusters and the cloud for rapid experimentation. The "ship fast, optimize later" strategy is becoming the norm.
VentureBeat: Top AI engineers prioritize deployment speed over cost
