alt Hacker NewsI do all of my “AI” development on top of AWS Bedrock that hosts every available model except for OpenAIs closed source models that are exclusive to Microsoft.
It’s extremely easy to write a library that makes switching between models trivial. I could add OpenAI support. It would be just slightly more complicated because I would have to have a separate set of API keys while now I can just use my AWS credentials.
Also of course latency would be theoretically worse since with hosting on AWS and using AWS for inference you stay within the internal network (yes I know to use VPC endpoints).
There is no moat around switching models unlike Ben says.
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I agree there is no moat to the mechanics of switching models i.e. what openrouter does. But it's not as straightforward as everyone says to switch out the model powering a workflow that's been tuned around said model, whether that tuning was purposeful or accidental. It takes time to re-evaluate that new model works the same or better than old model.
That said, I don't believe oai's models consistently produce the best results.
Have you noticed any significant AND consistent differences between them when you switch? I frequently get a better answer from one vs the other, but it feels unpredictable. Your setup seems like a better test of this
openrouter.ai does exactly that, and it lets you use models from OpenAI as well. I switch models often using openrouter.
But, talk to any (or almost any) non-developer and you'll find they 1/ mostly only use ChatGPT, sometimes only know of ChatGPT and have never heard of any other solution, and 2/ in the rare case they did switch to something else, they don't want to go back, they're gone for good.
Each provider has a moat that is its number of daily users; and although it's a little annoying to admit, OpenAI has the biggest moat of them all.