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So basically, Hy3 is the cheapest decent model on OpenRouter, unless you use DeepSeek as the provider for DeepSeek V4 Flash, in which case DeepSeek's insane caching wins out. (And Hy3 is close-ish on the benchmarks.)
> Two new models are now beating LLM darling Claude in terms of token usage and by more than 50%?

Time for a reminder that OpenRouter leaderboards only show tokens sent through OpenRouter, which most Anthropic API users don’t use.

I would think that's true for all the models on OR. The data is skewed for sure, but it's interesting none the less.
Are you next going to say YouTube rankings don't take into account videos that aren't on YouTube and Spotify rankings don't take into account songs that aren't on Spotify?
That doesn't mean it can't be used as a market signal. These 2 things can both be true at once.
I'm pretty sure the popularity came from being free at some point
> it makes sense that a cheaper model would prevail, but only if it offered similar quality

You're trying to think logically, which has no place in an AI discussion. :) People just jump to whatever the latest model is. Plenty of people also prefer price to "quality" (which is very subjective). It's new, it's cheap, so people use it. It's likely people will stop using it when something else is cheaper and/or newer.

Since my employer pays for it, I just select the latest and greatest.
Since there’s only one inference provider it could be a recycling/ad experiment. The similar usage between trial and paid periods would be explained by this as well.
First model I've tried that gave me back HTML with a "Change Pelican Color" button: https://static.simonwillison.net/static/2026/hy3-preview-pel...

(Transcript: https://gist.github.com/simonw/c2a0d8ecd3056a2681319eae8fc3f...)

But…and I’m sure I’m not alone here…that is a snowman, and what it is on is not a bicycle.

What do we think we are doing with this life?

...the animate wheels button makes sun start to spin
OpenRouter rankings frustrate me, because they show the total number of tokens but they provide no indication of how many unique users a model has.

Which means if a surprise model tops the leaderboard one week we can never be sure if it was because a single whale user pushing billions of tokens a day switched to it, or if it represents a genuine community trend towards that model.

Also, while we're pitching new features to openrouter, I'd like to see a "$ spent" chart, which would remove all these huge freebie spikes. It looks like it would be pretty much dominated by claude.
(openrouter co-founder here)

Yeah we should do something to indicate cardinality. I can share that there can often (I'm talking generally; not related to this model in particular) be e.g. a very large app that can be pushing a lot of volume. But in almost all cases that app has a large number of end users. Hypothetically, for instance, would Cursor be consider one user, or millions?

Will think about it! Thanks for the feedback.

For the life of me I will never understand the thought process that leads you to say "we don't really know who developed this LLM but I'm going to feed all of my business's data to it"
How do you “feed data into a model” ? Use the correct terminology and concepts please. It is important.
I’ve tested this model on four of my benchmarks:

https://github.com/lechmazur/buyout_game 10th out 36.

https://github.com/lechmazur/pact/ 14th out 25.

https://github.com/lechmazur/nyt-connections/ 60th out 81.

https://github.com/lechmazur/debate 16th out of 29.

Would be interesting to see the 27B dense Qwen 3.6 model thrown into the mix.
Good stuff!

Is there a reason you change the leaderboard graphs for the third and fourth one?

Also: would be great to have an overview page with a summary over all test, like a total score or similar.

oh, I love the connections benchmark.

Just curious, can you share what are those hardest puzzles that even the top models can't crack? sometimes when I find the puzzle absolutely undecipherable I like to ask LLMs to solve it, and I haven't seen them fail yet.

Tried this extensively in OpenCode, never used it once since Gemma 4 came out, got into thought loops and did stupid edits I didn't ask for more often than the local 31b model. One of the worst "frontier" models I've ever tried.
This article got me messing with it, and I'm loving it as a post-training target.

Training on ~1B tokens on 8xB300 and the first checkpoint halfway in learned really well. Tencent might be struggling with agentic work, but the base knowledge is there.

How is it a "mysterious" model? It's Tencent's Hy3?
PSA: Don't use OpenRouter for DeepSeek V4 as it messes up you caching. Use DeepSeek API directly and you'll get 2x to 3x more cached tokens.
Can you share more? I'm with OpenRouter and we would love to address this! We don't see this in our own testing, I don't believe -- but will share this feedback and dig in.
Here is some data from my experience using both deepseek v4 flash directly, and deepseek v4 flash via openrouter.

Directly: 135M input tokens - $0.57 (134M cached)

Via OpenRouter 6M tokens - $0.81 (caching stats & inp/out not reported)

Caching is a huge win with using deepseek directly.

Just try. In a case last week it was ~3x and I tried multiple providers: deepseek, gmicloud/fp8, novita/fp8, and another one I can't remember. It was a large job where at least 2/3rds of the start of the prompts was exactly the same (literally a static string).

Then I read somewhere (I think X) that OpenRouter adds stuff and breaks caching (telemetry? headers? can't remember). So I stopped the job, switched to actual DeepSeek provider, and voilá, caching 3x more tokens per request (on average).

> switched to actual DeepSeek provider

I meant actual DeepSeek API.

I am experiencing this using Opencode. Caching works fine via Deepseek API but not so good via Openrouter
When you say Deepseek API, you mean servers in China? Or is it a copy of the model operated and run by OpenRouter?
Yes, I definitely noticed a problem with openrouter and deepseek v4 pro. It's much more expensive.
What's so mysterious? Isn't it from Tencent?
High token usage cuz it's free doesn't count
FYI - DeepSeek has NOT announced its own coding platform. That app is an independent project. It says so in the footer as well:

“Independent open-source project · not affiliated with DeepSeek”