We just shipped our biggest improvement to our provider router since the founding of OpenRouter.
Before, we prioritized mostly based on price. The new router now rewards the best quality inference for the actual cost of a request, so requests stay cheap but are also fast and reliable.
Providers that deliver more value automatically win more traffic, so every provider has a reason to keep improving. And every time a provider gets better, so does your inference on OpenRouter.
OpenRouter now routes by quality of inferenceRunning a trained model to get answers — the phase where AI is actually used, as opposed to trained.Full definition → relative to real request cost rather than mostly price, so traffic shifts toward faster, more reliable providers. Engineers using it may see different latency and reliability.
Terms in this piece · Glossary
inference — Running a trained model to get answers — the phase where AI is actually used, as opposed to trained.
