TLDR Tech / DevOps
Smart Routing in Unity AI Gateway: Match frontier quality with 30%+ lower cost per task
Databricks has launched Smart Routing in Beta through its Unity AI Gateway, a system that automatically matches coding tasks to models based on complexity rather than defaulting to the most expensive option. On internal workloads, Smart Routing outperformed any single model at 65% of the cost per task compared to a leading model like Opus 5, and matched Opus 5 on public benchmarks at less than half the cost. The system works natively inside Claude Code and Codex, and also runs through Omnigent, Databricks' meta-harness that routes across both models and coding harnesses. A lightweight classifier reads each task and labels it across several fields before the router decides whether to escalate to a frontier model or delegate to a cheaper one.
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