Hacker News

points by smodo 4 days ago | 0 comments

Openrouter stats seem to indicate that there is a lot of demand for ‘good enough at a good price.’ After all, not everyone is decompiling PS5 games. In fact, most people are just speedrunning notetaking apps in JavaScript frameworks.

[–] mbreese 4 days ago

But, Openrouter stats can only measure the usage they see. I'm not sure it is really all that representative of total LLM usage across the market.

I think that's the difference here -- OpenAI and Anthropic are competing more with each other (and Google Gemini) than they are with open weight models. While people on HN are familiar with Kimi and GLM models, I'm not sure how many casual users of LLMs know about them. I think the competitive risk open weight models pose to OpenAI and Anthropic is much further in the future.

There is a lot of usage that's only known by Anthropic or OpenAI that's not visible to the rest of the world.

[–] InsidiousWombat 3 days ago

And the share of the tasks where cheap open model is enough only grows in time.

Frontier models just fight over smaller and smaller piece of the pie and I suspect them pushing for security work is way to open potentially infinite token sink as attackers pay for tokens so defenders need to spend even more tokens to defens

[–] peddling-brink 4 days ago

> most people are just speedrunning notetaking apps in JavaScript frameworks.

I feel seen. But seriously, my app, with my preferences, written by a semi-trustworthy entity that isn’t trying to shove ads down my throat. That’s really great.

[–] sbarre 3 days ago

Yep, this. I've seen it coined as "the age of personal software" and I totally agree.

I've built easily a dozen personal apps in the last few months that I have no plans on releasing or sharing, run locally, and solve very specific productivity (or one-off) issues for me.

I would never have spent the time building these apps in the pre-LLM days because the effort wouldn't have been worth the gains.

But now? Sure Claude, build me a MacOS app in Swift that does this exact thing I need. Less than an hour later, it's done.

[–] nekooooo 3 days ago

i mean, i made myself a dvd player for my steam machine. i don't see how that makes anthropic money at real token costs.

when lyft line was heavily subsidized in SF by VC money, i used it almost daily to commute to work because it cost $2.50 each way. Now that it's $20, I don't use it.

[–] AtlasBarfed 3 days ago

Psst.... that's called "dumping".

[–] specialist 3 days ago

Yup.

Methinks (hopes) we're entering the era of mass customization.