OpenRouter is the largest open market for tokens, and has been essential in bringing healthy competition to the LLM inference space. Inference is complicated and can be optimized on multiple axes (cost, throughput, accuracy), so as an exchange they have the difficult task of deciding how to route between providers. This update now allows providers to distinguish themselves across any/all of these axes, and has pushed providers like us to improve our serving engines in ways that actually help the end user. It's been fun trying to red team the algorithm as OR shipped some of the initial changes, and we've really appreciated how transparent the team has been throughout the transtion. If you haven't read up on the new system, you should check out the docs! It's really quite beautiful.