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OpenRouter is joining Stripe

openrouter.ai

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Re: OpenRouter is joining Stripe

#381

Post by 0x457 »

mandevil wrote: post #334
Whiteshadow12 wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your main point is still right, the providers are beginning to shift to non-commodity features. Another example might be all the managed agent features, where you get a VM + model, right now it's mostly Google and Anthropic that have this offering. The service tier is another, where Google, Vertex, OAI, Anth offer it but only OAI and Google offer flex service tier and not all models from them get it. OpenRouter for m…

Fortunately Stripe is in the business of providing a single abstraction over an enormous pit of complexity, so I think they'll be in good hands!

I can see Stripe adding extra services on top. However, in their main business its "easy" for them because getting into payment processing is hard intially. But whole search, harness, VMs, agent loops are not hard to find somewhere else.

Re: OpenRouter is joining Stripe

#385

Post by oblio »

wat10000 wrote: post #378
seanclayton wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

It's very difficult for this sort of thing to change for the worse. It's basically impossible on the software side. If next year's model is worse then keep using this year's model. Hardware technology can potentially go backwards, but things have to get really bad for that to happen.

LLMs are inherently unreliable. We do already work with unreliable technologies for many things but there's this engineering principle called "use the right tool for the job".

And it's a lot more likely that LLMs can't be changed to become unreliable, it's just how they work. So we would need more basic research, that doesn't grow on trees and for which the timelines are basically open ended. Maybe tomorrow, maybe right after cold fusion hits mass adoption.

Re: OpenRouter is joining Stripe

#386

Post by RealStupidity »

DrewADesign wrote: post #380
RealStupidity wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm always surprised at how many people in the tech sector assume overcoming fundamental LLM weaknesses is always “just a matter of time,” and that time will arrive quickly enough to be relevant. If you haven’t seen any of the videos of people trying to get frontier LLMs to count consistently, you might think we’re further from LLM accountant than you realize. It’s not a data problem— I’m pretty sure they’ve encounte…

I'm not just talking about LLMs though. People thought the internet and email were just a fad that would never catch on. People thought that the idea of home computing was absurd. All because they only saw what was in front of them at the time.

Also, how many accountants do you know that are truly happy with their work? I'd like to think many of them would love to do something other than crunch numbers all day.

Re: OpenRouter is joining Stripe

#387

Post by oblio »

DrewADesign wrote: post #380
RealStupidity wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm always surprised at how many people in the tech sector assume overcoming fundamental LLM weaknesses is always “just a matter of time,” and that time will arrive quickly enough to be relevant. If you haven’t seen any of the videos of people trying to get frontier LLMs to count consistently, you might think we’re further from LLM accountant than you realize. It’s not a data problem— I’m pretty sure they’ve encounte…

> I'm always surprised at how many people in the tech sector assume overcoming fundamental LLM weaknesses is always “just a matter of time,” and that time will arrive quickly enough to be relevant.

Lots of techies are tech-optimists ("tech always improves quickly").

Lots of people also have dollar signs in their eyes (or related, such as increased visibility and scope).

Hard to tell which is which.

Re: OpenRouter is joining Stripe

#388

Post by dannyw »

drob518 wrote: post #240
Majromax wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As things settle down and commoditize, the value of switching on a dime diminishes as people lock into their favorite models I can imagine just the opposite outcome from the same scenario: as people settle into their favorite but commoditized models, competition for marginal inference cost will take over. A company like OpenRouter that promises the cheapest tokens by the minute becomes essential on the low-cost mar…

> A company like OpenRouter that promises the cheapest tokens by the minute becomes essential on the low-cost margin. Okay, I can see that, but if their value is just cost optimization, their ability to mark up the tokens becomes increasingly difficult as well. Or, people will build a router themselves to avoid paying the markup, possibly with reduced features, but someone will open source it. Heck, Claude or GPT can…

First, cost optimization directly contributes to how much markup they can charge. Say on average they deliver savings of 20%, that is excess value OR/Stripe can mostly capture.

Also, you don't need to mark up tokens much if you're a commodity volume business. Think of Costco and their margins & membership fees. Not everything has to be high margin, not everything has to be a SaaS subscription.

Re: OpenRouter is joining Stripe

#389

Post by odo1242 »

tomnipotent wrote: post #273
cute_boi wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which model/provider locks like this, most of them use chatgpt style apis anyway.

That requires that you create accounts and separately manage each provider you want to use. OpenRouter removes that - if a new provider gets added, you can start using them immediately.

So, you’re paying 15% tax on all AI costs to avoid creating an account?

Re: OpenRouter is joining Stripe

#390

Post by oblio »

RealStupidity wrote: post #386
DrewADesign wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm always surprised at how many people in the tech sector assume overcoming fundamental LLM weaknesses is always “just a matter of time,” and that time will arrive quickly enough to be relevant. If you haven’t seen any of the videos of people trying to get frontier LLMs to count consistently, you might think we’re further from LLM accountant than you realize. It’s not a data problem— I’m pretty sure they’ve encounte…

I'm not just talking about LLMs though. People thought the internet and email were just a fad that would never catch on. People thought that the idea of home computing was absurd. All because they only saw what was in front of them at the time. Also, how many accountants do you know that are truly happy with their work? I'd like to think many of them would love to do something other than crunch numbers all day.

> People thought the internet and email were just a fad that would never catch on. People thought that the idea of home computing was absurd.

We're far removed from "we've sold all the computers the world can buy" (back from when computers were the size of a building).

This is a disingenuous argument. The web and email were basically instant hits and people realized it. Similar story for home computing once the computing power caught up.

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