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  • Hacker News
  • positioning for commoditization of intelligence
    by zarp
  • I both think OpenRouter is not worth 7B$ and Stripe might have made a brilliant move in making this purchase, honestly just troubling thoughts around model inference and model token as the new traded currency go through my head.

    Imagine if Stripe's end game is to control which producers of tokens become visible for a price aka middleman tax for tokens. If AI is as big a change as people claim honestly AWS should have bought openrouter instead.

    But either way though 7B$ is just too rich no matter what, because the middleman tax is only worth it if you have a moat which OpenRouter doesn't.

    All it takes is one of the bigger players to get serious and they will have a similar platform up and working in months if not weeks. (like Vercel & Cloudflare are already doing but even they are small compared to the true behemoths)

    If hyperscalers start their own open routing service and cut off openrouter completely and become price competitive, I feel like they could wipe them out.

    7B$ is just too much. Without enough of a big defensible moat. Especially since you can use a router in-front of openrouter and move users piece meal.

    Can anyone explain what makes OpenRouter specifically worth 7B$ over everyone else? I say that as someone who has used a lot of similar services with similar results. Openrouter is better but only marginally.

    by minraws
  • https://archive.is/A2Yw4
    by x-n2o
  • Where is the guy who marks all the dupes? Day off? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49323381
    by root-parent
  • The harness is the router. I don't understand this.
    by m1ck
  • I would not be suprised to see Cloudflare launch a competitor in the next 6 mo. They've done similar before, and it fits their "middle man/service provider" vibe well.

    OpenRouter is good because of the market ecosystem play. I see this fragmenting similar to game distribution -- a handful of 3rd-party disti, 1 first-party disti, and some exclusivity/lockup/limited support outside of first party.

    I am very interested to see how Stripe develops this. I would be happy to see a less-clunky top-up solution, for example, perhaps with micropayments. Not sure what else they are planning.

    by Hasz
  • I was more skeptical of openrouter a year ago. Not hard to implement multiple models, but after getting burned multiple times (eg Google in particular) I see openrouter as serving a few key functions: (1) aggregating demand across neoclouds for performance etc (2) providing a great developer experience (3) easily switching models and normalizing the idiosyncratic nature of each. There are so many (good) model providers today this is more compelling now with 10+ solid model companies than a year ago when I thought it might be just 3.

    So I have shifted load away from calling some models to openrouter.

    by mchusma

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