51–60 of 279 posts
Is the Open in OpenRouter the same as in Open AI? I couldn’t find any repository or hosted code. Thought it'd be a open source, self hostable tool with a cloud offering but seems its just the latter?
Too bad api use is like 100x more expensive than subscriptions for the big 3.
Subscribing to a vendor locks you in to sudden price swings that the big 3 are happy to do. The market needs lubrication for competition and provider routers offer that.
I'm sure they're experiencing growing pains, but a larger model selection (and faster releases for open weights models), would keep us from using other providers. For example, it took much longer than it should have to get Qwen 3.6 ~30B class models released (almost 2 weeks if I recall)
It took me quite a while to come round to OpenRouter. Originally I didn't understand why anyone would put a proxy between them and an LLM, but it actually adds some quite significant value: 1. By far the lowest friction way to support and try out all the models. 2. They offer billing caps! Most model providers still don't do this [EDIT: maybe they do, see reply comment], but if you're going to run anything in public…
And what is their business model?
It took me quite a while to come round to OpenRouter. Originally I didn't understand why anyone would put a proxy between them and an LLM, but it actually adds some quite significant value: 1. By far the lowest friction way to support and try out all the models. 2. They offer billing caps! Most model providers still don't do this [EDIT: maybe they do, see reply comment], but if you're going to run anything in public…
And what is their business model?
coffee farmers -> middle man -> you
It took me quite a while to come round to OpenRouter. Originally I didn't understand why anyone would put a proxy between them and an LLM, but it actually adds some quite significant value: 1. By far the lowest friction way to support and try out all the models. 2. They offer billing caps! Most model providers still don't do this [EDIT: maybe they do, see reply comment], but if you're going to run anything in public…
And what is their business model?
I think they should go in this direction: they should make their own Model Agnostic versions of whatever functionalities other AI companies are making. Examples
1. personal chat app
2. the chat app working with their own implementation of memory
3. coding harnesses that are model agnostic
When I think of OpenRouter, I should think of "model agnostic LLM tools".
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Good points. The easy experimentation factor is helpful for development, though I would gently encourage everyone to migrate to the 1st party APIs for pricing at scale. OpenRouter is also a good place to find free LLM access with a catch: You should expect that any inputs and outputs are going into someone's training database. Clearly anyone who can pay should be using paid models with privacy protections, but the fr…
> You should expect that any inputs and outputs are going into someone's training database. True enough, in theory; but what exactly are you imagining would be a useful-enough signal in the OpenRouter request+response stream, that any company would want their data as training material? Even a single OpenRouter-API-key-identified subscriber's traffic, may consist of an mixture of traffic from multiple different sessio…