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27183 3 hours ago

unless it's all just tulip mania, then they just spent $7B on nothing

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LPisGood 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Here are some things that are abundantly clear to me.

1.) LLMs are useful for programming

2.) Open models are excellent and will continue to improve

3.) Economies of scale and ease of access mean self hosting is out of the question for a large number of users

This means that even if the largest labs are not worth trillions and a large amount of the data center build out is not as valuable as the builders project and GPU/RAM prices plummet, it will not matter at all for this business. People will want to buy cheap open source tokens from a centralized trusted provider.

$7 billion for a business with little overhead that is already within their core competency and has strategic growth potential seems like a very good deal.

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blobbers 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

What does openrouter actually do though? They buy a bunch of tokens from token providers and allow you to easily route queries between token processors?

This seems like the kind of thing that you can have Claude write in an afternoon for whatever service you're running. I don't see the value.

	▲	sipjca 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		people are lazy people don't want to maintain infra (ie adding new models all the time) people want their queries to work without thinking if a provider goes down, openrouter queries dont (ideally) it's really not that complex to understand

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27183 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Unfortunately we don't really know anything about OpenRouter or Stripe's numbers. They're both private companies. AFAIK there really isn't much information publicly available about how profitable or not OpenRouter actually is, or whether it has a little or a lot of overhead. So I can't really say whether $7B is reasonable or inflated. It seems like an enormous number, and my hunch is like all the other enormous numbers floating around in the AI space it's probably inflated by the hype bubble. But we just don't know.

Broadly I agree with you. It seems like they have an in-demand product and there could be a sustainable business there at least in principle. But whether it's a $7B business or a $70M business I can't say.

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doctorpangloss 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

depends what the tulips are. tokens? private growth stage shares?

openrouter is involved with a lot of scammy crypto personalities. maybe they are the tulips people have been manic about for too long. maybe the collisons are the tulips.