News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Google AI Ultra by Ancapistani on Tuesday May 20, 2025 @04:18PM (#44045495)
I wonder if there's an opportunity here to abstract away these subscription costs and offer a consistent interface and experience?

For example - what if someone were to start a company around a fork of LiteLLM? https://litellm.ai/

LiteLLM, out of the box, lets you create a number of virtual API keys. Each key can be assigned to a user or a team, and can be granted access to one or more models (and their associated keys). Models are configured globally, but can have an arbitrary number of "real" and "virtual" keys.

Then you could sell access to a host of primary providers - OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, Groq, Grok, etc. - through a single API endpoint and key. Users could switch between them by changing a line in a config file or choosing a model from a dropdown, depending on their interface.

Assuming you're able to build a reasonable userbase, presumably you could then contract directly with providers for wholesale API usage. Pricing would be tricky, as part of your value prop would be abstracting away marginal costs, but I strongly suspect that very few people are actually consuming the full API quotas on these $200+ plans. Those that are are likely to be working directly with the providers to reduce both cost and latency, too.

The other value you could offer is consistency. Your engineering team's core mission would be providing a consistent wrapper for all of these models - translating between OpenAI-compatible, Llama-style, and Claude-style APIs on the fly.

Is there already a company doing this? If not, do you think this is a good or bad idea?

Re:Google AI Ultra by wild_egg on Tuesday May 20, 2025 @04:38PM (#44045665)
Isn't that https://openrouter.ai? Or do you have something different in mind?
Re:Google AI Ultra by Ancapistani on Tuesday May 20, 2025 @05:00PM (#44045867)
I haven't seen this, but it looks like it solves at least half of what I was thinking.

I'll investigate. Thanks!

Re:Google AI Ultra by planetpluta on Tuesday May 20, 2025 @04:26PM (#44045569)
I think the biggest hurdle would be complying with the TOS. Imagine that OpenAI etc would not be a fan of sharing quotas across individuals in this way
Re:Google AI Ultra by Ancapistani on Tuesday May 20, 2025 @05:38PM (#44046182)
How does it differ from pretty much every SaaS app that's using OpenAI today?
Re:Google AI Ultra by chw9e on Tuesday May 20, 2025 @07:54PM (#44047070)
this is t3 chat from what i understand, but probably many people already doing this. this is a good approach for wrappers.
Re:Google AI Ultra by mrnzc on Tuesday May 20, 2025 @04:49PM (#44045783)
I think what Langdock (YC-backed, https://www.langdock.com) offers might be matching to your proposal?!
Re:Google AI Ultra by Ancapistani on Tuesday May 20, 2025 @05:00PM (#44045872)
Looks like this is at least the unified provider. I'll dig in - thanks :)