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> This acquisition and the Stripe acquisition of OpenRouter are puzzling. Both HF and OR, from a technological standpoint, don't appear to have much IP that can
by mewse-hn 1mo ago
> This acquisition and the Stripe acquisition of OpenRouter are puzzling. Both HF and OR, from a technological standpoint, don't appear to have much IP that cannot be easily replicated.
I was puzzled by the comments on the openrouter acquisition saying "they're just a proxy" - they're an open marketplace where models compete head-to-head, they're quite a bit more than just a proxy.
Hugging Face has essentially become github for model repositories and I think nvidia wanted to snag that before microsoft does.
- echelon 1mo ago> Hugging Face has essentially become github for model repositories and I think nvidia wanted to snag that before microsoft does. Given that most of the weights are from Chinese labs and teams, I'm surprised China's own ModelScope hasn't leapfrogged HuggingFace.
- everforward 1mo agoThat’s just two sides of the same coin. They run a proxy for LLM providers, which inevitably creates a marketplace. They’re amazon.com for tokens. The flip side that others are pointing out is that Amazon is sticky because there’s a sprawling, physical logistics apparatus underneath. You can’t replicate amazon.com’s business without billions of dollars and a decade of building warehouses. I don’t see where OpenRouter has that. As far as software goes, theirs doesn’t seem particularly tricky. LiteLLM does vaguely similar things, at least for organizations where managing accounts isn’t absurd overhead. They were first, and there’s money to be made there, but what’s stopping someone else from building LibreRouter that charges a 3% or 4% fee instead of 5%? That’s where I get dubious of their valuation.