I really do think we'll see a lot of value accrue in AI startups building 'model routing as a service' Not just OpenRouter - this includes a…

I really do think we'll see a lot of value accrue in AI startups building "model routing as a service" Not just OpenRouter - this includes a much broader set of verticalized agents and infrastructure. * For us it's document infrastructure: parsing, extraction, search * Another infra analogy is web search: Exa/Parallel * For verticalized apps it could be anything from Cognition to Harvey The frontier labs own the underlying models, and their main application at the app layer is the enormous amounts of $$ that they have; but their main disadvantage is that they only own a subset of all the points on the Pareto curve. Speaking from our team's experience, it is both non-trivial and extremely important to find a point on the pareto curve of accuracy and cost. There's enormous amounts of ML time spent on model evaluations and benchmarking, and infra time making sure that the service can scale reliability, without rate limits, and without blowing up cost. At the same time it's extremely important not just for cost reasons but also latency, and oftentimes long-tail accuracy in use cases that demand it. Good take My guess is - demand for intelligence is near infinite - but 80% of workloads will be running on 99% cheaper models within 12-18 months - 20% of workloads will still run on latest gen models where IQ maxing is important (scientific breakthroughs, higher level ochestrato…

Source: Jerry Liu (X) | 2026-06-08