OpenRouter's focus and marketplace create its moat

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 15:25

   there was a lot of noise, a lot of comments, a lot of posts. And there was one take from people like Sam Lezen tweeted something like, there's no real technology behind OpenRouter. Every company is going to build their own. Ramp, which is a company focused on an entirely different set of things, launched their own router. What do you respond to that? Yeah, there's a lot of companies building MeToo routers right now.

2. 15:56

   um and you know i i think like a big fundamental difference with It's not a side quest for us. It is our main quest. Everything I'm 100% focused on is building the best marketplace, gateway, and router, and having that level of focus, I think, changes things dramatically. um you know it means that we are ahead by you know like both in in the quality of the router the like breadth of the marketplace the um the like strategy that we set um and the talent that we acquire it's like it's the talent that's like focused on this problem um and you know and and we do a lot of work also with the ecosystem because like open router is kind of an ecosystem driven company.

3. 16:54

   Like we want to help models and providers find their audience, like someone with a great innovation from like some Neo lab or some new inference provider, you know, we want them to find like to get to market as quickly as possible. And we want the whole world to know about them. And we like our mission is to improve neurodiversity and AI. So that allows us to kind of provide natural marketplace benefits.

4. 17:26

   The biggest marketplace has this natural moat where all the labs and providers and the supply side that has innovations wants to be on it. And in turn, developers and businesses find the best prices and the most variety and the highest quality inference all on open router and you know just making sure this marketplace magic works at scale yeah is like like the core focus of the business and it's you know like all marketplaces it's pretty hard to replicate and do you see a world where it really diversifies to like all type of models once there's amazing biology focused models and robotics models like people can go to open router to access everything yes and we have an enormous variety of non-language models um there's there's video models image models speech to text text to speech uh there's embeddings models there's re-ranking models and now there's like

5. 18:27

   really exciting ways of comparing them all um we just launched this benchmarks explorer where you can explore models by benchmark and, and understand what the hell these benchmarks mean. Like basically, like tons of people reference MMLU without having any idea what a single MMLU question looks like. Now you can see, and we also have, we created our own benchmarks too. Like we have image and video benchmarks where you can just see all models try to render a wine glass that's like half full.

6. 19:01

   And you can see the models just, like, not quite get it. They have different levels of wine in each glass. But it's really easy to just see and compare them all. And we just kind of, like, find these cool, very general evals that help you choose what you want to choose and help your agent choose, too. So, you know, you'll find, like, a very cool diversity of models that will get more diverse in the future.