Mixture of experts means many specialists, but only a few work on each question. A router picks them. Everyone is still on the payroll, so the saving is in the work, not in the size of the team.
A short explainer video, under a minute. The manager, the receptionist and the specialists are an illustration.
At a glance
What Mixture of Experts Is
That is called mixture of experts. Many specialists, but only a few work on each question.
What Happens to One Question
A question arrives. The router picks a few experts.
Why It Matters
The video turns this into one question: what do we pay for, the whole team, or the few who work?
Our report on Ai2’s Olmo-core 3 says Ai2 states that it released Olmo-core 3, an open training framework for mixture-of-experts models, on 1 October 2026, and that its next-generation Olmo will use an MoE architecture. In one benchmark, Ai2 says, it grew the expert pool from 8 to 128 while selecting four experts per token and keeping about 3.2 billion parameters active per token. Those are Ai2’s own figures, and our piece verified none of them independently.
The Business Engineer Lens
Where this idea sits in the Business Engineer library:
The Business Engineer framework maps where each part of the AI stack sits and who holds the leverage. These pills are short lessons from the same library.
Mixture of Experts builds on Parameters. In mixture of experts every expert still takes up space even when idle, so total size and work per question differ.
Mixture of Experts contrasts with Model Routing. Model routing picks a whole model per request; mixture of experts routes each question to a few specialists inside one model.
Mixture of Experts drives the cost of Inference. Only a few experts work on each question, which cuts the work per answer even though every expert still takes space.
Gennaro Cuofano is a CRO and tech executive who has worked in AI since late 2015, starting with bringing NLP, natural-language generation, voice and chatbot products to the marketing industry. His background is in law and finance: he holds a Master's degree in Law and an International MBA with an emphasis on corporate finance (LUISS Business School and the University of San Diego, 2012), and worked as a financial analyst at a real-estate investment firm in San Diego and as an assistant controller. His work focuses on business model strategy, business engineering and, more broadly, structural analysis: how companies make money, read from their own filings. He created FourWeekMBA and leads research there and at The Business Engineer, his newsletter on AI and business strategy, with over 95,000 subscribers and more than 1,000 published analyses. His writing has also appeared on Entrepreneur (for example, How to Digitize a Family Business in Europe) and HackerNoon. Find him on LinkedIn and Substack. See how we source.
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