I would guess the real value of the position Openrouter has in the ecosystem is that they can intercept all data and sell training data from many people, training data that is about as directly relevant for training as it can get. They would not need to log all your data for this, "sampling" is enough, and might in fact be even better sampled.

Note: this would include both the request, the response, and competitive responses. This would be very high quality training data.

Now at the current point they're sporting and make this data sampling option opt-out, and indeed they do. By default, they collect your data.

Model companies will pay a lot for this, especially now, more than customers will ever give to openrouter. Think about this: this is a constant stream of data of exactly what people and companies do with AI models, for all models, updating LIVE.

Second, they can provide "competitive intelligence" as well, telling models live how well they're doing and what exactly their strong and weak points are, and in what distribution of token requests this results.

There may even be financial companies that pay for this data.

so basically anybody who uses openrouter from now on is going to have all their data exfiltrated to stripe and then to all the banks/insurance companies... when I read the article that's what I think is going on and it doesn't smell good....

Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49323381

> Today, we are excited to announce that we are...

Why do they always start with this. Every single one of them. You dont even want to read anything after that. Its the same "Blah blah nothing will change you will get the best of both worlds blah blah"

This is before Stripe completing their acquisition of PayPal (which will happen). [0]

Maybe there is some plan to pump Stripe's valuation to over $1TN before an IPO.

Who knows.

[0] https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/stripe-advent-offer...

Woah now also a 75perc discount on OpenRouter for flash 3.7. Is it really the same product (speed? and up time)? Why would Google do that?

glad I never used them now

> For years, OpenRouter has been called “Stripe for LLMs.”

holy crap, save some butter for the bread omg

Why stripe page? The money... LOL

I don't see the use for open router, I can switch API providers without any hassle with just a couple of lines of code and a drop down. Good for them and for those who milk the AI bubble