alt Hacker News> OpenRouter
Do we have the balance sheet for OpenRouter & co?
Especially in this age where if you put AI in your company's mission statement you're drowned in money.
Let's hold off on calling something "cheap" until the external financing money runs out and the actual numbers are revealed AND audited.
> yes it's cheap.
When running toy models that do basically 0 of what regular people expect from state of the art LLMs, sure.
Running Apache is cheap. Running Google search isn't. They both serve web pages.
Replies
treis • today at 3:26 AM
Except for movie pass startups are marginally profitable on whatever they sell.
OpenRouter is the router. We don't care about their financials, the point is that you can buy inference via them for $x/token on a variety of models for a variety of providers. Those are businesses not propped up by SV VC dreams, just hosting plus compute and their costs.
Running a local LLM isn't a mainstream normal thing to do, sure but saying it's "basically 0 of what regular people expect from state of the art LLMs" is lazily dismissing evidence because it contradicts your beliefs. It does work, and it works at a level somewhere above "basically zero" for nerds who are willing and able to set it up for themselves today. The comparison isn't Apache, it's ElasticSearch. It's not Apache cheap and simple, but it's also not Google Spanner expensive.