> I think there is a moderately large market for models like this that aren’t quite SOTA level but can be served up much cheaper.

There isn't, pretty much everyone wants the best of the best.

Real numbers mostly appear in calculus (e.g. the chain rule in gradient descent/backpropagation), but "discrete calculus" is then used as an approximation of infinitesimal calculus. It uses "finite differences" rather than derivatives, which doesn't require real numbers:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finite_difference

I'm not sure about applications of real numbers outside of calculus, and how to replace them there.