September 21, 2026
AI companies have stopped doing the hard stuff: there are now 27 model routers on the market
Dax Raad counted 27 router products between models: the AI market is building lightweight wrappers while leaving the heavy infrastructure underneath to others.
dax
@thdxr
AWS made the industry complacent. We are used to it taking on every hard problem, while anyone can be a pure product company with 85% margins. AI infrastructure is not mature enough for that yet, but everyone acts as if the real work can be dumped on someone else. That is where the 27 router products between models come from. Even most inference companies do the bare minimum on infrastructure someone else has built. And it all looks successful because there is so much money around that the hard path cannot be justified: the easy one is profitable anyway. But the gap between OpenAI, Anthropic, DeepSeek, Moonshot, and everyone else is huge. And it is easy to forget that someone will have to close it by hand.
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Dax Raad counted 27 router products between models: the AI market is building lightweight wrappers while leaving the heavy infrastructure underneath to others.
The gap between OpenAI, Anthropic, DeepSeek, Moonshot, and everyone else will still have to be closed by hand.
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