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> I think there is a moderately large market for models like this that aren’t quite SOTA level but can be served up much cheaper. There isn't, pretty much ever

• scoopdewoop 7mo ago
  That isn't true. In a Codex or Claude Code instance, sure... but those are not the main users of APIs. If you are using LLMs in a service for customers, costs matter.
• Aurornis 7mo ago
  The market for API tokens is bigger than people like you and I (who also want the best) using then for code. There are a lot of data science problems that benefit from running the dataset through an LLM, which becomes bottlenecked on per-token costs. For these you take a sample subset and run it against multiple providers and then do a cost versus accuracy tradeoff. The market for API tokens is not just people using OpenCode and similar tools.
• sidrag22 7mo ago
  maybe there isnt, but as understanding grows people will understand that having an orchestration agent delegate simple work to lesser agents is significant not only for cost savings, but also for preserving context window space.
• Someone1234 7mo ago
  > There isn't, pretty much everyone wants the best of the best. For direct user interaction or coding problems, perhaps. But as API calls get cheaper, it becomes more realistic to use them for completely automated workflows against data-sets, or as sub-agents called from expensive SOTA models. For example, in Claude, using Opus as an orchestrator to call Sonnet sub-agents, is a popular usage "hack." That only gets more powerful, as the Sonnet equivalent model gets cheaper. Now you can spawn entire teams of small specialized sub-agents with small context windows but limited scope.
  • thinkcontext 7mo ago
    > But as API calls get cheaper, it becomes more realistic to use them for completely automated workflows against data-sets Seems like a huge waste of money and electricity for processes that can be implemented as a traditional deterministic program. One would hope that tools would identify recurrent jobs that can be turned into simple scripts.
    • Someone1234 7mo ago
      It depends on the specific task. For example: "Here our dataset that contains customer feedback comment fields; look through them, draw out themes, associations, and look for trends." Solving that with a deterministic program isn't a trivial problem, and it is likely cheaper solved via LLM.
      • cubefox 7mo ago
        It makes sense if the dataset is so large that LLM cost is a prohibitive factor. Otherwise a frontier LLM has the advantage of producing a better result.
  • alexsmirnov 7mo ago
    Exactly. I did create my own MCP with custom agents that combine several tools into a single one. For example, all WebSearch, WebFetch, Context7 exposed as a single "web research" tool, backed by the cheapest model that passes evaluation. The same for a codebase research Use it with both Claude and Opencode saves a lot of time and tokens.
    • hadlock 7mo ago
      I'd be interested in seeing the source for this if you have a moment
    • alexclapp 7mo ago
      Smart approach combining tools behind a single interface. The "cheapest model that passes evaluation" pattern is underrated. One data point that might help with the research tool: not all APIs work equally well when called by agents. We scored 387 APIs on agent-friendliness and 54% fail the bar. The main gaps are no CLI tool (66%) and no machine-readable pricing (72%). If your research tool is helping agents pick APIs to integrate, the scores at clirank.dev/api/apis?sort=score could save the expensive model from wasting tokens on APIs that'll fail headless.
• regularfry 7mo ago
  Everyone may want the best, but the amount of AI-addressable work outstrips the budget available for buying the best by quite a wide margin.
• joefourier 7mo ago
  Ever hit your daily limit on Claude Code and saw how expensive it is to pay per token?
  • girvo 7mo ago
    All the time now… it’s wild how little usage you get with Opus on the Pro sub now haha
• PhilippGille 7mo ago
  The OpenRouter usage stats indicate the opposite: https://openrouter.ai/rankings?view=month https://openrouter.ai/rankings?view=month
  • jjice 7mo ago
    OpenRouter usage is likely skewed towards LLMs that are more niche and/or self-hostable by solid hardware that's available, but most consumers don't have on hand. I can imagine Anthropic and OpenAI LLMs often get called directly from their APIs instead. At least from my experience and friends of mine, we use OpenRouter for cases where we want to use smaller LLMs like Qwen, but when I've used ChatGPT and Claude, I use those APIs directly.
    • senordevnyc 7mo ago
      Same, and my little SaaS is pushing more than 0.1% of the TOTAL volume of tokens on OpenRouter, so the reality is they’re TINY.
      • imtringued 7mo ago
        0.1% of OpenRouter is around 400 billion tokens per month or around $400k per month at a cost of $1 per 1 million input tokens, not counting output. I think it's pretty disingenuous to call your SaaS little when it is projected to spend at least 5 million USD just on tokens and this is a low end estimate.
        • senordevnyc 7mo ago
          Their homepage says 30T tokens monthly, so 0.1% would be 30 billion. And I pay way less than $1 per input token, especially when caching is taken into account. EDIT: they updated it in the last day or two, now it says 70T, so I’m a little below 0.1% now. But seriously, the point stands, 70T tokens a month just isn’t that much in the global scheme. The big labs are pushing quadrillions each.
• noman-land 7mo ago
  OpenCode allows for free inference tho.
• esafak 7mo ago
  That's only because current models don't saturate people's needs. Once they are fast and smart enough people will pick cheaper ones.
• wolttam 7mo ago
  Nope. I get very good results from GLM 5 and 5.1. I’m not working on anything so complex and groundbreaking that I need the best. Coding is a rung on the ladder of model capability. Frontier models will grow to take on more capabilities, while smaller more focused models start becoming the economical choice for coding
  • girvo 7mo ago
    GLM-5 is surprisingly good to be fair. Punches well above its weight IMO
• wongarsu 7mo ago
  For coding I want the best. Both I and $work do lots of things besides coding where smaller models like qwen3.5-27b work great, at much lower cost.
• thraxil 7mo ago
  No. Right now I'm upset that Google has removed (or at least is in the process of removing) the Gemini 2.0 flash model. We use it for some pretty basic functionality because it's cheap and fast and honestly good enough for what we use it for in that part of our app. We're being forced to "upgrade" to models that are at least 2.5 times as expensive, are slower and, while I'm sure they're better for complex tasks, don't do measurably better than 2.0 flash for what we need. Yay. We've stuck with the GCP/Gemini ecosystem up until now, but this is kind of forcing us to consider other LLM providers.
  • toofy 7mo ago
    this is one of the reasons im hearing more and more people are using open/locally hosted models. particularly so we dont have to waste time to entirely redo everything when inevitably a company decides to pull the rug out from under us and change or remove something integral to our flow, which over the years we've seen countless times, and seems to be getting more and more common. products entirely disappearing or significantly changing will be more and more common in the llm arena as things move forward towards companies shutting down, bubbles deflating, brand priorities drastically reshifting, etc... i think, we're at or at least close to a time to really put some thought into which pieces of your flow could be done entirely with an open/local model and be honest with ourselves on which pieces of our flow truly needs sota or closed models that may entirely disappear or change. in the long run, putting a little bit of thought into this now will save a lot of headache later.
    • jimbokun 7mo ago
      What’s interesting about this is that for previous technologies you could define a standard and demonstrate compliance with interfaces and behavior. But with LLMs, how do you know switching from one to another won’t change some behavior your system was implicitly relying on?
    • thraxil 7mo ago
      Yeah. Back when Gemma2 came out we benchmarked it and were looking at open models. For our use case though, while the tasks are pretty simple, we do need a pretty large context window and Gemini had a big lead there over the open models for quite a while. I'll probably be evaluating the current batch of open models in the near future though.
• wolvoleo 7mo ago
  Not really. It depends on the usecase. For private stuff I'm very happy to take what was SOTA a year or 2 ago if I can have it all running in my home and don't have to share any of my data with some sleazy big tech cloud. The price is a concern too of course. But privacy is a bigger one for me. I absolutely don't trust any of their promises not to use data for training purposes.
• freehorse 7mo ago
  Not all tasks require models like opus. If they do not, then it is more efficient to use cheaper and faster models. For most of my tasks now I use the big kimi/qwen/glm models because they are cheap and good enough, if not even the smaller locals ones. I would say that for a significant part of the current market open-source models are good enough to fill a part of it.