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> This sure looks like a race to the bottom

Always has been. My prediction is that both OpenAI and Claude will go bust unless they deliver a killer product. And unlike scrappy startups, they have a pretty serious deadline because creditors will come a-knockin'.

There's little to no functional difference between Kimi, Qwen, Sol, Opus, etc. All flagship models are within like 1-5% of each other and the real moat will be what's always been the hard part: making a good product.

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> All flagship models are within like 1-5% of each other

Don't know about that.

I'm using code review of my lone lisp project as a benchmark. It's a massive parallel code review where a coordinator cuts up the codebase into sections and dispatches agents to consider each part from different perspectives like quality, maintainability, consistency, correctness, rigor, etc.

Ran a complete Fable/max code review. Took over a month on a subscription. Now I've switched to OpenAI and am repeating the exact same review with Sol/max.

It's still not done yet but preliminary findings suggest Sol can only reproduce 70-90% of Fable's findings. So I think these models aren't as close as we've been led to believe.

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Check the remainder for hallucination for sure.
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The problem is that most of the volume doesn't come from proprietary products, it comes from API use which has no stickiness.

Claude already has a killer product (claude.ai/chat is a Swiss army knife) but just relying on people typing stuff into chat is not enough to sustain the company.

The other strategy is entrenching yourself as the LLM of choice into existing products (like ChatGPT is on Apple products).

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> All flagship models are within like 1-5% of each other

Depends on your use case. the Chinese models are not there yet.

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There is a massive difference even between Opus and Fable, same provider, before various harnesses and other optimizations come into play. Don't be deceived by rankings and benchmarks, try for yourself.
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If you believe https://artificialanalysis.ai/

This is basically undercutting KimiK3 and Grok 4.6 where previously utilised gad soke advantages but was a step more expensive

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But who can take a benchmarking website seriously when they literally change their benchmarks to appease anthropic, like artificialanalysis.ai did the other day?
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You do it if you can afford to do it and your competitor can't.
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Who are OpenRouter’s competitors?
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OpenRouter doesn't decide on the pricing.
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They do decide on the 5% markup. But as far as I can tell, all other routers just match 5%. Not sure what they're competing on.
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Yes but Sol dropping in price by 50% is not OpenRouter deciding. It's OpenAI.
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I don’t think that’s true. OpenAI docs don’t have this price change. I assume they’d be the source for this post if it was true. The banner on OpenRouter for me says Gemini 3.7 discounted for a limited time, but if I click through that I get to this page: https://openrouter.ai/models?discount=true

That shows a bunch of models, including Sol, with a discount. None of them say how long it’s for, but I’d assume in all their cases it’s for a limited time as the banner said, and only on OpenRouter.

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OpenRouter margins are not 50%.
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As I understand OAI is offering discount only for users using the model via OR. Not sure why. Maybe they want OR users to try the model and switch to OAI subscription or something.
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It might also be worth noting that the discount is only if OpenAI itself is used as the provider via OpenRouter. The discount does not exist for Azure or Amazon hosted Sol.

I posted elsewhere, but the Azure uptime & performance for Sol is truly dire. OpenAI is offering 5x faster latency, 4x faster tokens generation, and vastly better uptime (Azure US has only 87% uptime), all for 50% of the price now. I assume the pricing is to compete with other shiny new models (Grok, Qwen etc), but it might also be to cut-off a truly poorly performing Microsoft hosting experience.

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Yes, but this discount must be coming from OpenAI and not Open Router.
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That kind of is a reason.
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The lower the merrier.
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Competition is good for users.
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Sorry I meant to say lower, price that is, corrected.
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