"to power the next wave of GDP growth" is a wonderfully shallow but impressive clause.
OpenRouter is joining Stripe
361–370 of 532 posts
Re: OpenRouter is joining Stripe
#362nice!
Re: OpenRouter is joining Stripe
#363Earlier quoted context omitted.
At some point AI will be able to deal with the repetitive and template based parts of accounting better than accounting. Which is saying a lot.
I'm not sure that's true. LLMs seem too unreliable for accounting.
I'm always surprised at how many people in the tech sector don't think that things can and will change. In the next couple of years? Sure. 5+? Who knows. Necessity is the mother of invention.
Re: OpenRouter is joining Stripe
#364Can someone help me understand why OpenAI, Anthropic & other proprietary models would want to make their offerings available on OpenRouter? It seems strategically not in their interest.
They already sell API access to the model on Google/Microsoft/Amazon cloud. OpenRouter is the same deal. Note that the labs are not giving out model weights to OpenRouter. They are just selling tokens.
OpenAI/Anthropic/etc don’t establish the direct customer relationship.
And OpenRouter can steer traffic away from those labs over to their own model.
The major labs don’t get personalized data about the user to train on, since it’s aggregated.
Which is just some of the reasons why strategically it doesn’t seem in their best interest to allow a middle person.
Re: OpenRouter is joining Stripe
#365Hm. This seems random. Other than the fact that they are both technology companies, is there anything else that they have in common?
Stripe is positioning themselves as one of the leading adopters of AI internally. I don't know of public stats but I estimate they're spending on the order of $millions per week on tokens. I assume they've adopted Openrouter and the majority of that spend is going via Openrouter. So they understand the product value, they understand the current gaps, and there's also a threat mitigation. They've likely become very de…
Follow-up: Somehow in all that I forgot the most obvious pairing. Stripe wants to solve how agents pay for things. They’ve been quite open about this. Seems obvious that any solution to that is going to be through the model platform layer - so they just bought a major platform layer.
Re: OpenRouter is joining Stripe
#366Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not sure that's true. LLMs seem too unreliable for accounting.
I'm always surprised at how many people in the tech sector don't think that things can and will change. In the next couple of years? Sure. 5+? Who knows. Necessity is the mother of invention.
Things can easily change for the worse, such as a stock market crash. Who knows? Will we get AGI or will we see more homeless? History says... AGI for sure!
Re: OpenRouter is joining Stripe
#367Earlier quoted context omitted.
They already sell API access to the model on Google/Microsoft/Amazon cloud. OpenRouter is the same deal. Note that the labs are not giving out model weights to OpenRouter. They are just selling tokens.
OpenAI/Anthropic/etc don’t establish the direct customer relationship. And OpenRouter can steer traffic away from those labs over to their own model. The major labs don’t get personalized data about the user to train on, since it’s aggregated. Which is just some of the reasons why strategically it doesn’t seem in their best interest to allow a middle person.
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Re: OpenRouter is joining Stripe
#368Can someone help me understand why OpenAI, Anthropic & other proprietary models would want to make their offerings available on OpenRouter? It seems strategically not in their interest.
They get paid the same either way, Openrouter takes their cut and passes it onto the consumer. And anyone with an Openrouter account has already escaped from their proprietary moat. So for those who have expressed a clear preference for provider-agnostic model infrastructure, do you want to just wall yourself away from them forever?
And per the rankings [0] 18.2% of the tokens sold through went to OpenAI [1]. 3.8% for Anthropic though. Google's up there at 23.4% primarily because GCP/Vertex/whatever they're offering is a billing nightmare and the only way to set a hard cap and sure you won't wake up the next day with a $10k bill is via OR.
[0] https://openrouter.ai/rankings#market-share
[1] Although gpt-oss 20b and 120b are indexed as 'openai' because they're the creator even though they don't serve gpt-oss via openrouter. But neither are in the top 20 of models this month, while Luna and Sol are.
Re: OpenRouter is joining Stripe
#369Earlier quoted context omitted.
They already sell API access to the model on Google/Microsoft/Amazon cloud. OpenRouter is the same deal. Note that the labs are not giving out model weights to OpenRouter. They are just selling tokens.
OpenAI/Anthropic/etc don’t establish the direct customer relationship. And OpenRouter can steer traffic away from those labs over to their own model. The major labs don’t get personalized data about the user to train on, since it’s aggregated. Which is just some of the reasons why strategically it doesn’t seem in their best interest to allow a middle person.
It's a land grab. Right now none of them have a dominant position. Much better to get mind share and market share now. They can always squeeze the value chain later. And whoever wins surely will.
Re: OpenRouter is joining Stripe
#370Earlier quoted context omitted.
We are in a bubble, but you are looking at this in the wrong way. OpenRouter basically creates lock-in through Stripe's distribution and family of products; it is much stronger within Stripe than alone. I agree valuations are absurd, but it is what it is. But if we have to go through a bubble for a16z to crash and burn, I am all for it.
So customers use OpenRouter to avoid lock-in to specific model providers, and in doing so they lock-in into openrouter's aggregation API? Lock-in to what exactly? A string(string) function without any further restrictions? Note that aggregator users will not use more specific parameter features (because those vary by vendor), or they escape the aggregator and lock-in directly string(string, vendorOptions={"openAI.log…
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