Openrouter raised their last round in May at a ~$1.3B valuation and just 82 days later Stripe has announced that it will be acquiring Openrouter for $7B+. We've been seeing astronomical growth for AI companies, so I am now a bit used to seeing incredible growth in valuations over a very short period of time (we have multi trillion dollar companies that didn't exist 4-5 years ago so... ). But even in this insane growth environment I couldn't wrap my head around this 5-6x growth in 82 days and so want to know what the HN community thinks I am missing.
I beg you DeepSeek just name it 4.1, you are not going to run out of numbers. While we're at it why don't you also append the git commit hash to the name as well
I heard on the "China Talk" podcast talking about China and exports of open weight models they often do this because under Chinese law, they have to submit each new public model release to a government department for "validation", and if they keep the version the same, they don't need to re-submit it.
well, I think it is easier for the developers, we don't have to change the model name everytime. deepseek also does not have resource to serve 2 different v4 pro versions.
This is crazy! So OpenAI's models escaped containment and hacked into Hugging Face. And ironically Hugging Face had to rely on GLM 5.2 as they could not defend with frontier models (I presume OpenAI or Anthropic) because they were locked out due to their security guardrails. Tragically hilarious.
OpenAI had total access to the most powerful unleashed models that exist, and was unable to use them to prevent a specific known to be evil computer from connecting to the Internet. I don’t see how Huggingface would have better luck hardening their entire public attack surface, with or without unleashed models.
For all the bad things about AI it is kinda cool that I get to witness the dawn of AI-vs-AI hacker combat, not just in a single mainframe but distributed across potentially thousands of machines in physically separate datacenters.
I do agree that Chinese open-source models are going to play a bigger and bigger role in the entire ecosystem moving forward, but I don't agree with you in the sense that they are going to eventually "win."
Just because they are cheapp doesn't mean they automatically win. You've picked a lot of great examples, but there is still a little bit of cherry-picking.
One clear outlier is the iPhone, which coexists with Android globally. Even though the iPhone is the leader in the US, and globally Android has the majority of the smartphone market share, they still cater to different price points and different ecosystems, and generally the iPhone has better margins.
i believe American frontier models like from Anthropic and OpenAI are still going to thrive, and coexist with Chinese models. They are just going to cater to different customers and different use cases.
