4 ms·

Hypermode Model Router Preview – OpenRouter Alternative

33 points by iamtherhino 1y ago

jbellis 1y ago
What I'm seeing with Brokk (https://brokk.ai https://brokk.ai) is that models are not really interchangeable for code authoring. Even with frontier models like GP2.5 and Sonnet 3.7, Sonnet is significantly better about following instructions ("don't add redundant comments") while GP2.5 has more raw intelligence. So we're using litellm to create a unified API to consume but the premise of "route your requests to whatever model is responding fastest" doesn't seem that attractive. But OpenRouter is ridiculously popular so it must be very useful for other use cases!
- johnymontana 1y ago
  I think the value here is being able to have a unified API to access hosted open source models and proprietary models. And then being able to switch between models without changing any code. Model optionality was one of the factors Hypermode called out in the 12 Factor Agentic App: https://hypermode.com/blog/the-twelve-factor-agentic-app https://hypermode.com/blog/the-twelve-factor-agentic-app Also, being able to use models from multiple services and open source models without signing up for another service / bring your own API key is a big accelerator for folks getting started with Hypermode agents.
- iamtherhino 1y ago
  Hey! Co-founder of Hypermode here. Agreed on swapping models for code-gen doesn't make sense. We're mostly indexed on GPT-4.1 for our AgentBuilder product. I haven't found it easy to move between models for code super effective. The most popular use case we've seen from folks is on the iteration/experimentation phase of building an agent/tool. We made ModelRouter originally as an internal service for our "prompt to agent" product, where folks are trying a few dozen models/MCPs/tools/data/etc really quickly as they try to find a local maximum for some automation or job.
- 0xDEAFBEAD 1y ago
  Are there any of these tools which will use your evals to automatically recommend a model to use? Imagine if you didn't need to follow model releases anymore, and you just had a heuristic that would automatically select the right price/performance tradeoff. Maybe there's even a way to route queries differently to more expensive models depending on how tricky they are. (This would be more for using models at scale in production as opposed to individual use for code authoring etc.)
  - jbellis 1y ago
    Yeah, that seems possible, but a dumb preprocessing step won't help and a smart one will add significant latency. Feels a bit halting-problem-ish: can you tell if a problem is too hard for model A without being smarter than model A yourself?
    - 0xDEAFBEAD 1y ago
      I imagine if your volume is high enough it could be worthwhile to at least check to see if simple preprocessing gets you anywhere. Basically compare model performance on a bunch of problems, and see if the queries which actually require an expensive model have anything in common (e.g. low Flesch-Kincaid readability, or a bag-of-words approach which tries to detect the frequency of subordinate clauses/potentially ambiguous pronouns, or word rarity, or whatever). Maybe my knowledge of old-school NLP methods is useful after all :-) Generally those methods tend to be far less compute-intensive. If you wanted to go really crazy on performance, you might even use a Bloom filter to do fast, imprecise counting of words of various types. Then you could add some old-school, compute-lite ML, like an ordinary linear regression on the old-school-NLP-derived features. Really the win would be for a company like Hypermode to implement this automatically for customers who want it (high volume customers who don't mind saving money). Actually, a company like Hypermode might be uniquely well-positioned to offer this service to smaller customers as well, if query difficulty heuristics generalize well across different workloads. Assuming they have access to data for a large variety of customers, they could look for heuristics that generalize well.
      - 1y ago
threeducks 1y ago
The Python API example looks like it has been written by an LLM. You don't need to import json, you don't need to set the content type and it is good practice to use context managers ("with" statement) to release the connection in case of exceptions. Also, you don't gain anything by commenting variables with the name of the variable. The following sample (probably) does the same thing and is almost half as short. I have not tested it because there is no signup (EDIT: I was mistaken, there actually is a "signup" behind the login link, which is Google or GitHub login, so the naming makes sense. I confused it with a previously more prominent waitlist link.) import requests # Your Hypermode Workspace API key api_key = "<YOUR_HYP_WKS_KEY>" # Use the Hypermode Model Router API endpoint url = f"https://models.hypermode.host/v1/chat/completions" headers = {"Authorization": f"Bearer {api_key}"} payload = { "model": "meta-llama/llama-4-scout-17b-16e-instruct", "messages": [ {"role": "system", "content": "You are a helpful assistant."}, {"role": "user", "content": "What is Dgraph?"}, ], "max_tokens": 150, "temperature": 0.7, } # Make the API request with requests.post(url, headers=headers, json=payload) as response: response.raise_for_status() print(response.json()["choices"][0]["message"]["content"])
- iamtherhino 1y ago
  Signups are open: hypermode.com/sign-up There's a waitlist for our prompt to agent product in the banner. That's a good call to update it to be more clear.
  - threeducks 1y ago
    Oh, I did not catch that. Sorry!
    - iamtherhino 1y ago
      Not at all! I'm updating the banner now
- iamtherhino 1y ago
  updated our python example too!
hobo_mark 1y ago
Is there something like OpenRouter, but for text-to-speech models?
- iamtherhino 1y ago
  I haven't seen one yet-- no reason we couldn't do that with Hypermode. I'll do some exploration!
maxbendick 1y ago
The logo is fairly evocative of the SS insignia. To explain in the clearest terms: unlike the SS insignia, the lightning bolt in the logo has tapering at the bottom. The second element in the logo, the slash, does not have tapering at the bottom. The general shape of the logo is the same as the SS insignia: two diagonal elements side-by-side (which would be all good on its own). The mind tends to see repetition, so it has a tendency to "mix up" the two elements of the logo. The mind also has a tendency to remember similar things. Putting it all together, the logo has a chance to evoke the SS insignia. I may just be reading too much Theweleit and W. Reich nowadays, but I think you'll get catch some flak for this logo if it becomes recognizable outside the tech milieu.
- iamtherhino 1y ago
  Thanks for the feedback-- I can say emphatically, that's not our intention in the least. We chose a lightning bolt to evoke speed, i.e., the "hyper" in Hypermode. I've asked design to take another look at the "H" logo.
  - maxbendick 1y ago
    Thanks so much for replying. I didn't think it was your intention at all.

33 points by iamtherhino 1y ago

What I'm seeing with Brokk (https://brokk.ai https://brokk.ai) is that models are not really interchangeable for code authoring. Even with frontier models like GP2.5 and Sonnet 3.7, Sonnet is significantly better about following instructions ("don't add redundant comments") while GP2.5 has more raw intelligence. So we're using litellm to create a unified API to consume but the premise of "route your requests to whatever model is responding fastest" doesn't seem that attractive. But OpenRouter is ridiculously popular so it must be very useful for other use cases!

johnymontana 1y ago
I think the value here is being able to have a unified API to access hosted open source models and proprietary models. And then being able to switch between models without changing any code. Model optionality was one of the factors Hypermode called out in the 12 Factor Agentic App: https://hypermode.com/blog/the-twelve-factor-agentic-app https://hypermode.com/blog/the-twelve-factor-agentic-app Also, being able to use models from multiple services and open source models without signing up for another service / bring your own API key is a big accelerator for folks getting started with Hypermode agents.
iamtherhino 1y ago
Hey! Co-founder of Hypermode here. Agreed on swapping models for code-gen doesn't make sense. We're mostly indexed on GPT-4.1 for our AgentBuilder product. I haven't found it easy to move between models for code super effective. The most popular use case we've seen from folks is on the iteration/experimentation phase of building an agent/tool. We made ModelRouter originally as an internal service for our "prompt to agent" product, where folks are trying a few dozen models/MCPs/tools/data/etc really quickly as they try to find a local maximum for some automation or job.
0xDEAFBEAD 1y ago
Are there any of these tools which will use your evals to automatically recommend a model to use? Imagine if you didn't need to follow model releases anymore, and you just had a heuristic that would automatically select the right price/performance tradeoff. Maybe there's even a way to route queries differently to more expensive models depending on how tricky they are. (This would be more for using models at scale in production as opposed to individual use for code authoring etc.)
- jbellis 1y ago
  Yeah, that seems possible, but a dumb preprocessing step won't help and a smart one will add significant latency. Feels a bit halting-problem-ish: can you tell if a problem is too hard for model A without being smarter than model A yourself?
  - 0xDEAFBEAD 1y ago
    I imagine if your volume is high enough it could be worthwhile to at least check to see if simple preprocessing gets you anywhere. Basically compare model performance on a bunch of problems, and see if the queries which actually require an expensive model have anything in common (e.g. low Flesch-Kincaid readability, or a bag-of-words approach which tries to detect the frequency of subordinate clauses/potentially ambiguous pronouns, or word rarity, or whatever). Maybe my knowledge of old-school NLP methods is useful after all :-) Generally those methods tend to be far less compute-intensive. If you wanted to go really crazy on performance, you might even use a Bloom filter to do fast, imprecise counting of words of various types. Then you could add some old-school, compute-lite ML, like an ordinary linear regression on the old-school-NLP-derived features. Really the win would be for a company like Hypermode to implement this automatically for customers who want it (high volume customers who don't mind saving money). Actually, a company like Hypermode might be uniquely well-positioned to offer this service to smaller customers as well, if query difficulty heuristics generalize well across different workloads. Assuming they have access to data for a large variety of customers, they could look for heuristics that generalize well.
    - 1y ago

threeducks 1y ago

The Python API example looks like it has been written by an LLM. You don't need to import json, you don't need to set the content type and it is good practice to use context managers ("with" statement) to release the connection in case of exceptions. Also, you don't gain anything by commenting variables with the name of the variable. The following sample (probably) does the same thing and is almost half as short. I have not tested it because there is no signup (EDIT: I was mistaken, there actually is a "signup" behind the login link, which is Google or GitHub login, so the naming makes sense. I confused it with a previously more prominent waitlist link.) import requests # Your Hypermode Workspace API key api_key = "<YOUR_HYP_WKS_KEY>" # Use the Hypermode Model Router API endpoint url = f"https://models.hypermode.host/v1/chat/completions" headers = {"Authorization": f"Bearer {api_key}"} payload = { "model": "meta-llama/llama-4-scout-17b-16e-instruct", "messages": [ {"role": "system", "content": "You are a helpful assistant."}, {"role": "user", "content": "What is Dgraph?"}, ], "max_tokens": 150, "temperature": 0.7, } # Make the API request with requests.post(url, headers=headers, json=payload) as response: response.raise_for_status() print(response.json()["choices"][0]["message"]["content"])

iamtherhino 1y ago
Signups are open: hypermode.com/sign-up There's a waitlist for our prompt to agent product in the banner. That's a good call to update it to be more clear.
- threeducks 1y ago
  Oh, I did not catch that. Sorry!
  - iamtherhino 1y ago
    Not at all! I'm updating the banner now
iamtherhino 1y ago
updated our python example too!

hobo_mark 1y ago

Is there something like OpenRouter, but for text-to-speech models?

iamtherhino 1y ago
I haven't seen one yet-- no reason we couldn't do that with Hypermode. I'll do some exploration!

maxbendick 1y ago

The logo is fairly evocative of the SS insignia. To explain in the clearest terms: unlike the SS insignia, the lightning bolt in the logo has tapering at the bottom. The second element in the logo, the slash, does not have tapering at the bottom. The general shape of the logo is the same as the SS insignia: two diagonal elements side-by-side (which would be all good on its own). The mind tends to see repetition, so it has a tendency to "mix up" the two elements of the logo. The mind also has a tendency to remember similar things. Putting it all together, the logo has a chance to evoke the SS insignia. I may just be reading too much Theweleit and W. Reich nowadays, but I think you'll get catch some flak for this logo if it becomes recognizable outside the tech milieu.

iamtherhino 1y ago
Thanks for the feedback-- I can say emphatically, that's not our intention in the least. We chose a lightning bolt to evoke speed, i.e., the "hyper" in Hypermode. I've asked design to take another look at the "H" logo.
- maxbendick 1y ago
  Thanks so much for replying. I didn't think it was your intention at all.