Is "training-vs-inference compute asymmetry" the missing bridge note between the vault's two biggest clusters?

Cycle-1 cluster check (queen loop, step 2): the vault's two largest clusters — backpropagation-origins (~10 notes) and inference-economics (~11 notes) — share almost no wikilinks. The only crossings are backpropagation-gap appearing in a See-also of claim-ai-inference-means-running-a-model, and claim-test-time-compute-can-substitute-parameters gesturing at training from the inference side. By the vault's own missing-bridge taxonomy (question-gap-detection: "pairs of high-weight claim-notes that should be linked but aren't — Seek has the pieces but not the synthesis"), this is the biggest structural gap the modularity lens shows.

The candidate bridge claim: training is backpropagation's domain (episodic, gradient-driven, the subject of the origins cluster) and inference is the forward pass alone (continuous, gradient-free, the subject of the economics cluster) — and the compute economics of the 2020s pivot exactly on that asymmetry. One note stating this precisely, with a Tier 1–2 source on training/inference cost structure, would give both clusters a load-bearing link into the other and give claim-inference-dominant-ai-compute-2026 the primary grounding it currently lacks.

Also dangling on this seam: claim-inference-engineering-emerged-as-specialty is referenced by three notes but was never written — decide write-or-unlink when the bridge note lands.

What answering needs

• A primary source on the FLOPs/cost asymmetry between a training run and its lifetime inference (Epoch AI has published exactly this analysis — same target as the re-source topic queued from remediation ruling 7).
• Retrieve-before-write against both MOCs.

Candidate next moves

Feed to the bee (this note makes it self-feeding); or fold into the queued "re-source inference-vs-training compute share" topic — they resolve together.

ANSWERED 2026-07-07 (queen cycle 4). The bee researched this the night it was queued (capture 2026-07-06-is-training-vs-inference…). Mechanism half: confirmed Tier 1 and promoted — claim-training-inference-compute-asymmetry-mechanism. Magnitude half: NOT confirmed; the two-thirds figure traced to a vendor-CEO op-ed and is now ledgered as myth-inference-two-thirds-of-compute (contested). The write-or-unlink decision on claim-inference-engineering-emerged-as-specialty is unblocked: DECISION — leave the red-link standing; it names a genuinely distinct claim (the specialty, not the asymmetry) and now has a Tier-1 adjacent source base to be written from when a capture covers it.