Super interesting data.

I do question this finding:

> the small model category as a whole is seeing its share of usage decline.

It's important to remember that this data is from OpenRouter... a API service. Small models are exactly those that can be self-hosted.

It could be the case that total small model usage has actually grown, but people are self-hosting rather than using an API. OpenRouter would not be in a position to determine this.

Thank you & totally agree! The findings are purely observational through OpenRouter’s lens, so they naturally reflect usage on the platform, not the entire ecosystem.

While it is possible to self-host small models, it is not easy to host them with high speeds. Many small-model use-cases are for large batches of work (processing large amounts of documents, agentic workflows, ...), and then using a provider that has high tps numbers would be motivated.

Still, I agree that self-hosting is probably a part of the decrease.

The bigger issue is that they count small based on fixed number of parameters, and not the active parameter for MoE, didn't account for any hardware improvements etc. If they counted small based on the price or computational cost, I think they would have seen increase in small models.