Introduction and conversation with Alex Attala, CEO of OpenRouter

Hey all, Alex here… well, not actually here, I’m scheduling this post in advance, which I haven’t yet done, because I'm going on vacation!

That’s right, next week is my birthday 🎉 and a much needed break, somewhere with a beach is awaiting, but I didn’t want to leave you hanging for too long, so posting this episode with some amazing un-released before material.

Mixture of Agents x2

Back in the far away days of June 20th (not that long ago but feels like ages!), Together AI announced a new paper, released code and posted a long post about a new method to collaboration between smaller models to beat larger models. They called it Mixture of Agents, and James Zou joined us to chat about that effort.

Shortly after that - in fact, during the live ThursdAI show, Kyle Corbitt announced that OpenPipe also researched an approached similar to the above, using different models and a bit of a different reasoning, and also went after the coveted AlpacaEval benchmark, and achieved SOTA score of 68.8 using this method.

And I was delighted to invite both James and Kyle to chat about their respective approach the same week that both broke AlpacaEval SOTA and hear how utilizing collaboration between LLMs can significantly improve their outputs!

This weeks buzz - what I learned at W&B this week

So much buzz this week from the Weave team, it’s hard to know what to put in here. I can start with the incredible integrations my team landed, Mistral AI, LLamaIndex, DSPy, OpenRouter and even Local Models served by Ollama, LmStudio, LLamaFile can be now auto tracked with Weave, which means you literally have to only instantiate Weave and it’ll auto track everything for you!

But I think the biggest, hugest news from this week is this great eval comparison system that the Weave Tim just pushed, it’s honestly so feature rich that I’ll have to do a deeper dive on it later, but I wanted to make sure I include at least a few screencaps because I think it looks fantastic!

Open Router - A unified interface for LLMs

I’ve been a long time fan of OpenRouter.ai and I was very happy to have Alex Atallah on the show to talk about Open Router (even if this did happen back in April!) and I’m finally satisfied with the sound quality to released this conversation.

Open Router is serving both foundational models like GPT, Claude, Gemini and also Open Source ones, and supports the OpenAI SDK format, making it super simple to play around and evaluate all of them on the same code. They even provide a few models for free! Right now you can use Phi for example completely free via their API.

Alex goes deep into the areas of Open Router that I honestly didn’t really know about, like being a marketplace, knowing what trendy LLMs are being used by people in near real time (check out WebSim!) and more very interesting things!

Give that conversation a listen, I’m sure you’ll enjoy it!

That’s it folks, no news this week, I would instead like to recommend a new newsletter by friends of the pod Tanishq Abraham and Aran Komatsuzaki both of whom are doing a weekly paper X space and recently start posting it on Substack as well!

It’s called AI papers of the week, and if you’re into papers which we don’t usually cover, there’s no better duo! In fact, Tanishq often used to come to ThursdAI to explain papers so you may recognize his voice :)

See you all in two weeks after I get some seriously needed R&R 👋 😎🏖️

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