BAR Conjecture: the Feasibility of Inference Budget-Constrained LLM Services with Authenticity and Reasoning

Abstract

When designing LLM services, practitioners care about three key properties: inference-time budget, factual authenticity, and reasoning capacity. However, our analysis shows that no model can simultaneously optimize for all three. We formally prove this trade-off and propose a principled framework named The BAR Theorem for LLM-application design.