At this point I believe that when people do not cite using AI to generate their comment it's from a position of malice... like you're intentionally trying to position yourself as capable in whatever subject you're talking on but realistically you are not given the reliance on an LLM. Not saying anything about OP but just a general observation/opinion I've been building recently. Seems more common than ever to larp using AI.
I did it once when I tried vibecoding, to a friend, nothing professional, and I watched myself stop at the explanation of how I did something. I think it comes from a place of desire, self delusion and shame (of not being able to do it alone), very similar to lying in general, people lie about what they want to be the truth.
Sorry - that probably came across as more passive-aggressive that I mean it. Just wanted to point out that guideline. People have easy access to AI, so they can always ask it for a summary if they want to and it doesn't really add anything to the discussion.
Is that 100M of openrouter revenue? Or money that flows through openrouter? If the latter, 100M$ annualized looks like very little. It's as if a bank said that it has 100M$ of annual transfers, instead of 100M in revenue from bank fees and such.
Hard to think of any type of company that can do the topline meme as effectively as a compute aggregator proxy. Almost like a bitcoin pool mining company counting their shared miners.
Really? 100M annual? That HAS to be profit, it can't be this crazy.
EDIT: From their website, they say they have 200T monthly tokens, at 10 cents per M token ( optimistic average between free tokens and expensive tokens) that's 20M$/month, which is roughly 240M$.
Bonus track: here's chatgpt completely fumbling the above very simple calculation
We are in a bubble, but you are looking at this in the wrong way. OpenRouter basically creates lock-in through Stripe's distribution and family of products; it is much stronger within Stripe than alone. I agree valuations are absurd, but it is what it is. But if we have to go through a bubble for a16z to crash and burn, I am all for it.
So customers use OpenRouter to avoid lock-in to specific model providers, and in doing so they lock-in into openrouter's aggregation API?
Lock-in to what exactly? A string(string) function without any further restrictions? Note that aggregator users will not use more specific parameter features (because those vary by vendor), or they escape the aggregator and lock-in directly string(string, vendorOptions={"openAI.logprobs":true})
Selling vendor lock-in to vendor lock-in avoidant customers sounds like a losing proposition, like trying to beat competition on price and undercutting, which is a thing openrouter does too btw, the main reason people use these products is to get cheaper prices. I don't think 2$/M tokens is expensive, and I don't think those that try to cut costs are going to win, whether devs cutting token costs, or small business owners with 5 employees who look at AI as a way to fire 2 of them. I get that the other end of the spectrum is overspending and tokenmaxxing, but the conclusion is that extremes are bad? Nothing new here.
I applied for the first time a couple of months ago and again this month, but unfortunately I haven’t heard back from them :(
I’m building EasyInvoicePDF - a free and open-source invoice generator. (900+ GitHub stars, 2k monthly users on average, 10k total invoices downloaded)
