SOXL slips 2%, Mistral's open Le Chonk, and the LLM serving-cost question

Growth outran chips, Mistral dropped an open-weight flagship, and we break down how to cut serving costs without breaking quality. Markets: SOXL down 2.08% to $71.60; VUG up 2.18% to $86.68; QQQ up 1.73% to $697.15; VGT up 1.53% to $117.04. AI news: Mistral releases Large 4, nicknamed Le Chonk, as open weights on Hugging Face as independent benchmarks become the key thing to watch. Interview Tip of the Day: Serving cost is too high for a large model. Compare quantization, distillation, speculative decoding, KV-cache size and paging, prompt caching, and smaller routed models. Which would you try first given a fixed quality bar? Did You Know: Build a smart plant pot that texts you when the soil is dry. Questions or feedback: [email protected]