Mixture of Experts Decoded: Why Compute Efficiency Comes With a Memory Price Tag

Mixture of Experts (MoE) architecture promises 70B model performance at 7B compute costs, but hides a critical trade-off: while each token activates only a fraction of the model's parameters, the full parameter set must still be loaded into memory. This distinction is crucial for real-world deployments, where memory constraints often determine viability as much as compute efficiency does.