Comment by Bolwin
9 days ago
OpenRouter is not indicative of volume. Most high volume clients will go to the providers directly. There's not point to paying the 5% OR cut if you know what you want.
9 days ago
OpenRouter is not indicative of volume. Most high volume clients will go to the providers directly. There's not point to paying the 5% OR cut if you know what you want.
That's just it: This is not happening with the Chinese models, because western corporations are the primary drivers of AI adoption globally and western corporations are not signing up for a DeepSeek API key. If they're working with Chinese models at all, which they rarely are, it is via a western-hosted provider like Bedrock, Vertex, or OpenRouter; or self-hosting. Sure, hobbyists and individual programmers might be comfortable forming a business relationship with a nationalized Chinese entity, but you'd need a microscope to see that relative to the spend that, say, Eli Lilly is throwing at Anthropic every week.
But you're right that OpenRouter is only one data point. It is, unfortunately, one of the few we have.
Here's another: https://xcancel.com/FireworksAI_HQ/status/206010388602804673...
Fireworks is processing 30T tokens a day on open models, or about 210T a week. So about 40% of gemini? I'd say that's pretty good.
Two more points: 1. https://openrouter.ai/provider/fireworks ~5B tokens average daily on openrouter from fireworks, which is a ration of ~1:6000 2. https://openrouter.ai/rankings total tokens on openrouter, ~4T daily, and more than half seems to be open. Say 2T.
If other providers' ratio is anywhere close to fireworks, that's on the order of 10 quadrillion open tokens daily.
That said I'd guess the ratio is probably not nearly as high for most providers.