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.

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Hasz 2 hours ago | parent [-]

I specifically think many of the hyperscalers are a bad choice to platform on because they have their own models. You cannot build a viable platform business while directly competing with your potential customers and partners, the incentives are too out-of-whack.

Stripe/CF/Vercel are presumably not going to do foundational model development, so safe there. They are already platform plays to begin with, this strengthens that position.

	▲	minraws an hour ago \| parent [-]
		I can bet AWS won't be doing any serious foundational model development, I knew folks on their AGI team now it's not even big enough to compete with the chinese labs... :3 Azure I am not sure how long they will be around doing MAI thinking models, I feel like they will pivot to smaller simpler enterprise only models. And given they already own npm and github openrouter might have made sense though I think they might buy huggingface, not that I want them to but it just feels like it. Google IDK what google is doing exactly all my friends I knew in the AI teams are out a while ago, so maybe they are doing something really great we just don't know yet. But I feel like it makes sense for hyperscalers since they can push their weight around a lot better than openrouter and can offer extra compute when providers are under crunch at higher prices to handle spikes. I think they are the only ones who can truly do fluid compute for GPU/AI in the short term(next couple of years). Maybe after than we might have other big players in the space. Given the sheer scale of buildout I can almost guarantee we will see this pivot, otherwise there is too much hardware and token prices are too high.