> For instance, calling Gemini with "search grounding" isn't something that OpenRouter can do (they sub their own web search in)
replyIt can: https://openrouter.ai/docs/guides/features/server-tools/web-...
It's apparently even the default these days (which makes sense, as it's usually better in my experience).
Nice. Happy to be mistaken on that point as that seems very useful.
replyYour main point is still right, the providers are beginning to shift to non-commodity features.
replyAnother example might be all the managed agent features, where you get a VM + model, right now it's mostly Google and Anthropic that have this offering.
The service tier is another, where Google, Vertex, OAI, Anth offer it but only OAI and Google offer flex service tier and not all models from them get it.
OpenRouter for me is an abstraction over that complexity, they will have their work cut out for them.
Fortunately Stripe is in the business of providing a single abstraction over an enormous pit of complexity, so I think they'll be in good hands!
replyI can see Stripe adding extra services on top. However, in their main business its "easy" for them because getting into payment processing is hard intially. But whole search, harness, VMs, agent loops are not hard to find somewhere else.
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