As AI agents/harness/human are spenders of tokens, enabling them to derisk from being locked to a specific model provider & allowing to (re)route to any model at anytime for better leverage in a single API, similar to how they are doing for payments.
Example: access to real-time stock trading data, access to weather information, letting it make stock trades, etc.
At first I was confused why Stripe bought OpenRouter, but I think this makes sense.
The user could log into his personal OpenRouter account, authorize your application, and optionally set a budget, all in something like a Stripe payment screen.
Like standard oauth?
Perhaps stripe thinks metering is a lovely big market? A nice complement to their existing service. Plus a little AI buzz likely helps their valuation. OpenRouter could be a step rather than a goal.
As user agents become more common it's only natural that they will be used for taking the heavy lifting out of e-commerce purchases. There will be a big need for digital payments to verify and reconcile these purchases.
With LLMs that are plugged into digital payments we will essentially have buying agents in our pocket that can find us exactly what we want for the cheapest price and the quickest delivery.
Which is saying a lot.
And there is no necessity. We have accountants.
Also, how many accountants do you know that are truly happy with their work? I'd like to think many of them would love to do something other than crunch numbers all day.
We're far removed from "we've sold all the computers the world can buy" (back from when computers were the size of a building).
This is a disingenuous argument. The web and email were basically instant hits and people realized it. Similar story for home computing once the computing power caught up.
Lots of techies are tech-optimists ("tech always improves quickly").
Lots of people also have dollar signs in their eyes (or related, such as increased visibility and scope).
Hard to tell which is which.
And it's a lot more likely that LLMs can't be changed to become unreliable, it's just how they work. So we would need more basic research, that doesn't grow on trees and for which the timelines are basically open ended. Maybe tomorrow, maybe right after cold fusion hits mass adoption.