[chickenWing]

It is cheaper now, but I wonder if it will continue to be cheaper when companies like Google and OpenAI decide they want to make a profit off of AI, instead of pouring billions of dollars of investment funds into it. By the time that happens, many of the specialized service providers will be out of business and Google will be free to jack up the price.

[kbaker]

I use Claude through OpenRouter (with Aider), and was pretty amazed to see that it routes the requests during the same session almost round-robin through Amazon Bedrock, sometimes through Google Vertex, sometimes through Anthropic themselves, all of course using the same underlying model.

Literally whoever has the cheapest compute.

With the speed that AI models are improving these days, it seems like the 'moat' of a better model is only a few months before it is commoditized and goes to the cheapest provider.