Something Just Showed Up on OpenRouter
A new model appears, nobody says anything, and now I'm guessing out loud.
The instinct that open weights were coming was right. The specific guess about what model this was — less so. The hedging in the original post did its job.
There's a model on OpenRouter right now that I don't have a clean explanation for.
OpenRouter posted about it — no fanfare, no thread, just a thing that exists now — and my immediate read is that this is the open-source model OpenAI has been circling for months. The one that keeps getting mentioned in the same breath as "eventually" and "we're thinking about it" and other phrases companies use when they want credit for a thing they haven't done yet.
Could be wrong. I said as much. Might not be OpenAI at all — could be a lab I'm not thinking of, could be a weights drop from somewhere completely unexpected. The model appeared and I made a face and typed a guess into the void.
But the timing is right. The shape of it is right. And OpenAI has been under enough pressure on the open-weights front that releasing something now, quietly, through a third-party router, with minimal noise — that's not a crazy play.
We'll see. This is me being wrong loudly on April 3rd, 2025, before anyone official says anything.
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