Hacker News Reader

Comment by merqurio | Hacker News Reader

If LLM providers continue grow and become such a standard part of the tech stack of any deployment, this acquisition makes a lot of sense. It's just another payment management system for stripe.

It's fun to see someone being able to exit so well without owning any model.

View on HN

The acquisition makes no sense, as most LLM providers only reason not to forbid them right now, is because they were funded by exactly the same VCs as the providers. Go check.

Of all the no moats they are the example of no moat. Its seconds switch to another router if even that is tolerated. And lets not even talk, the lack of compliance in an enterprise environment, and as they defer to providers on that...

But the acquisition makes a LOT of SENSE, if you realize that as the same VCs sit on Stripe, Anthropic, OpenAI and most important OpenRouter. Said VCs have a lot of interest in recovering their money...by pushing one of their companies to buy another one of their own, before LLMs providers financial pressures cut OpenRouter legs.

Is this stuff even legal? I will wait for Patrick Boyle video...

> And lets not even talk, the lack of compliance in an enterprise environment, and as they defer to providers on that...

A middleman that adds compliance & regulation while skimming a slice off the top for themselves: You just described credit cards - stripe's core business...

How is the middleman going to add compliance if its not the provider of the LLMs? And if that was possible OpenRouter would have done it already...

Very much the same line of business as Amazon Bedrock except OpenRouter gives more options (choice of where hosted, data retention options and so on).

>> choice of where hosted,

You dont understand Bedrock fundamental use case.

Yeah I do. You can get data locality in GovCloud, a U.S. data centre, or even EU regions.

It’s governed by your master AWS agreement (which will make your compliance officer happy), and billing is also conveniently handled by AWS.

Of course the Chinese models on it are rotten old and not cheap. But if you want to configure an app to use inference that is entirely controlled, it’s the next best thing to running local.

Most important...

- Your inputs are within the security boundary of your AWS account or AWS accounts

  Can OpenRouter say the same? - NO

- Your inputs are not shared with models creators

   Can OpenRouter say the same? - NO

- Your inputs are not used to train the next model

   Can OpenRouter say the same? - NO

- Within certain limits and certain models:

   "50.10.1. Subject to the limitations in this Section 50.10, AWS will defend you and your employees, officers, and directors against any third-party claim alleging that the Generative AI Output generated by an Indemnified Generative AI Service infringes or misappropriates that third party’s intellectual property rights, and will pay the amount of any adverse final judgment or settlement."

  Can OpenRouter say the same? - NO

> Within certain limits and certain models

For those that hadn't read yet (on https://aws.amazon.com/service-terms/):

"Certain models" means "only AWS's own trained models" (Nova etc), so not e.g. Bedrock Claude or GPT.

"Certain limits" means they don't defent if the input to the model is the IP.

You over-estimate the amount of sway investors have on Stripe. If VCs had the influence you're describing, Stripe would have gone public many years ago.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com