Podcasts about Primitive

In this message from the Ephesian series, I come to the first blessing that Paul names for God’s people – To be chosen in Christ before the foundation of the world. What was the basis of this choice? In this message, we look at this glorious truth. 09.20.26.Chosen.Tim.McCool

En Arkeologi på rappen SPESIAL: Hvem eier egentlig fortiden? Folkeforskning ble et sentralt tema i utgave 27 av Primitive tider – nå går vi i dybden. I denne første episoden utforsker vi sammen med Irmelin Axelsen (Kulturhistorisk museum) og Unn Pedersen (UiO) hvordan frivillig innsats har formet norsk arkeologi fra 1800-tallet og helt frem til i dag. Hvilke muligheter og utfordringer har det skapt – og hvor kan veien gå videre?

Courage is an essential companion every child of God needs in order to stand for the Lord and what is right. Without courage, we will certainly find ourselves cowering to the pressures of the world. In this sermon Brother Luke looks at the importance of courage and how to find it. 09.20.26.Courage.Luke.Hagler

In the series on Ephesians, I come to the subject of “heavenly places.” The people of Ephesus were spellbound by black magic. They used spells to try and connect to another world. If we think we are beyond such things, we are kidding ourselves. Most of us have a device in our hand, and we …

In this final message from Matthew 25, we continue our study of Jesus' teaching concerning the acts of mercy shown by His people, as reported to them in the final Judgment. We consider how acts of mercy demonstrate that our faith is authentic, and how Scripture connects genuine faith with a willingness to help others … Continue reading "Expanding on Acts of Mercy (Part 2) | Matthew 25"

From the earliest days of open-weight models to becoming the neutral routing layer for more than 10 million developers, OpenRouter is one of the clearest bets that the future of AI will be multi-model. In this episode, OpenRouter co-founder & CEO Alex Atallah, with AMP's Anjney Midha returning with swyx to unpack how OpenRouter emerged from the first wave of Llama, Alpaca, Mistral, and Midjourney, why model diversity mattered before it was consensus, and how a company dismissed as “just a wrapper” became critical infrastructure for the AI ecosystem.We go deep on the product and distribution lessons behind OpenRouter: why model labs can spend billions training a checkpoint and still struggle to get it into developers' hands, how Mistral helped prove the value of a competitive inference marketplace, why OpenRouter chose focus over expanding into fine-tuning, memory, and other adjacent products, and how its rankings became a real-time map of how AI usage was changing. Alex also explains OpenRouter's early experiments with model fusion, why they deleted the first version and brought it back years later, and how the platform grew to more than 10 trillion tokens per day.Finally, Anjney explains why Stripe and OpenRouter fit together, why token fraud may become one of the defining security problems of the AI economy, and why the next wave of fraud won't just come from humans but from autonomous agents attacking increasingly valuable token flows.We discuss:* Why OpenRouter bet early that no single AI model would win everything* Alpaca, Llama, and open models becoming impossible to ignore* Why Discord's early AI deployments exposed the limitations of closed models* Why model labs can spend billions on training and still fail at distribution* How OpenRouter became a neutral distribution layer for model developers* Why VCs dismissed OpenRouter as “just a marketplace” or “just a wrapper”* The Mistral price war and the first real proof of an inference marketplace* How Midjourney scaled through Discord and what it taught the AI ecosystem* Why crypto infrastructure became a dress rehearsal for generative AI* OpenRouter vs. LM Arena and why their missions are fundamentally different* Why focus became one of OpenRouter's biggest strategic advantages* Anthropic's early focus on AI pair programming and coding* The OpenRouter products that were prototyped but never launched* MOM, OpenRouter's early Mixture of Models experiment* Why model fusion failed in 2024 — and why it works much better now* How OpenRouter's leaderboard became a live map of the AI industry* OpenClaw, auto-routing, and agents reshaping AI usage* How OpenRouter reached 10+ trillion tokens per day* Why inference gateways are increasingly becoming targets for fraud* Why Stripe's fraud infrastructure is strategically important to OpenRouter* The coming rise of agentic fraud and attacks on the token economy* What changes and what stays the same as OpenRouter joins StripeAlex Atallah* LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexatallah/* X: https://x.com/alexatallah* Website: https://alexatallah.comAnjney Midha* LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/anjney/* X: https://x.com/AnjneyMidha* AMP: https://www.amppublic.com/Timestamps00:00:00 Introduction00:02:12 Alpaca, Llama, and the Multi-Model Bet00:06:04 Discord, Open Models, and OpenRouter's Origins00:14:28 Why “One Model Wins” Was the Wrong Bet00:17:27 Why Model Labs Struggle With Distribution00:23:04 “Just a Wrapper”: Why VCs Misunderstood OpenRouter00:27:58 Bootstrapping OpenRouter Through Community00:36:16 Crypto, Midjourney, and the Early Generative AI Ecosystem00:43:38 Mistral and the Birth of the Inference Marketplace00:47:10 OpenRouter vs. LM Arena00:52:08 Focus, Anthropic, and Roads Not Taken00:59:34 Mixture of Models and Model Fusion01:02:44 Sonnet, OpenClaw, and OpenRouter's Explosive Growth01:09:03 Why Stripe Acquired OpenRouter01:12:45 Fraud and the Emerging Token Economy01:17:47 The Coming Wave of Agentic Fraud01:19:07 What's Next for OpenRouter at StripeTranscriptIntroduction: OpenRouter, Marketplaces, and Pub-Sub as a Product PrincipleSwyx [00:00:00]: Okay, we are here in Anja's house, which is where all big startups in San Francisco start.Anjney Midha [00:00:08]: Howdy.Swyx [00:00:08]: And, congrats on Cursor, Mistral. I don'- God knows what else. You got so much stuff going on.Anjney Midha [00:00:17]: There's, there's a lot going on. Well, OpenRouter is probably the - has been the most, I would say, like, one I'm excited about recently.Swyx [00:00:24]: Yeah. And we have Alex, first time on the pod, but,Anjney Midha [00:00:27]: Thanks for having me.Swyx [00:00:27]: You've been in the IE a few times. I appreciate every time you've shown up, for the community. Congrats. I just, like, what a journey. When I was looking back at your past posts, one of the earliest principles that I saw you write as a product person is sub as a product principle. And I wanted - you to maybe explain how you think about what should exist in the world.Anjney Midha [00:00:49]: Yeah. The sub piece, which was early 2023, I didn't think about it until we talked like 10 minutes ago, is about how there is like a way of thinking about products as an intersection between subscribing to data and publishing data. And marketplaces are an easy example of this. You have suppliers that are publishing some product to a SKU. And the SKU is like a sub topic that a consumer is subscribing to and just going to, like, consume whenever they want. And humans consume in a very, like, discreet, ad hoc way. It's not very scalable. all their attention is on the topic when they're buying the thing, and their attention is nowhere else when that happens. agents and consumers of inference don't act like that. They're consuming continuously, and they're changing the SKUs that they consume from all the time. So OpenRouter is like a blend between a normal API experience and a marketplace where we create model slug. We have the auto router. We have all kinds of, like, product SKUs that you can subscribe to. And then you can, like, continuously add, like, derive value and make decisions based on those consumers.Alpaca, Llama, and the Multi-Model BetSwyx [00:02:11]: Yeah. This is something that was more consensus now, but not consensus when you guys started, which was that there is such a demand for swapping models and changing things out and, that people would not use the native SDKs. I guess, for each of you, what was your realization moment that this would be it? I, - You've, you've given a talk at EIE about Alpaca as,Anjney Midha [00:02:33]: Yeah.Swyx [00:02:33]: One of your inspiring moments.Anjney Midha [00:02:35]: Alpaca, I can, like, rehash the Alpaca moment for a sec. Like, the very beginning, at the end of 2022, OpenAI was the only game in town. There was, like, OpenAI, Cohere,Swyx [00:02:47]: Yes.Anjney Midha [00:02:48]: And then a smattering of, like, early attempts at open weight models.Swyx [00:02:54]: Yeah.Anjney Midha [00:02:54]: When Llama came out in January of 2023, it was like, “Wow, really exciting. This is really big.” It outperforms 3 on, one or two benchmarks. but you can't chat with it. It wasn't like - It wasn't an engaging model, but it seemed like someone just needed to fix a couple things and do some RLHF on it to get it all the way there. And Alpaca was the first model that I saw that did that. It only took $600 to do. A team at Stanford generated a bunch of synthetic data, tuned Llama, and made Alpaca, billion parameter model. Or was - Maybe it was thirteen billion parameters. And it was so good. Like, I was just, like, on an airplane using it. I, - in many cases, I, like, you could not discern a ChatGPT versus an Alpaca result. And I figured if it was this easy to make a model, one, we have a whole new way of monetizing data for the first time. you can just, like, take really valuable data and turn it into a service in $600. and that cost will probably go down over time.Swyx [00:04:03]: When you - So sorry. when you say monetizing your data as, what eventually will become an MCP endpoint or as a training data for a model?Anjney Midha [00:04:12]: Yeah, training data for a model.Swyx [00:04:13]: Awesome.Anjney Midha [00:04:13]: Like, an abstract way of saying like, “Hey, I have this data.”Swyx [00:04:15]: Compress it into a model.Anjney Midha [00:04:16]: Like, it makes sense for me in my product, but, like, I could repackage it in the form of a model and sell it. And so it's just a whole new business model for the economy. It also, of course, provides, like, a way of following what Frontier Labs are doing, but in a way that, like, a single developer or a small team of developers can roll on their own. And so - Whenever you have an example of that, like a breakout app that's doing really well, and then some framework for imitating it with - in your own flavor, you have an immediate ecosystem of, like an immediate ecosystem, like, should arise because there's just a huge gap between the, like, decisions that the single company is making and all of the variations in those decisions that, like, a wider ecosystem can create themselves. And so then, you need a marketplace to, like, discover all of those, services and all of those products. There wasn't any place on the internet that, like, was like a home base for LLMs in terms of seeing how much they were being used and seeing who was using them and why.Swyx [00:05:29]: The closest would be Hugging Face.Anjney Midha [00:05:30]: Hugging Face was the closest at the time, yeah.Swyx [00:05:31]: They just started Hugging, like, a few years ago before that.Anjney Midha [00:05:34]: Yeah, and Hugging Face also didn't have the closed-source models.Swyx [00:05:37]: Yeah.Anjney Midha [00:05:38]: And they didn'- you couldn't use the models at the time. and there wasn't data about who was using them. There were, like, a bunch of differences between OpenRouter and Hugging Face, and those differences felt really critical to me, especially when I was just trying to learn about LLMs and, like, why people are choosing, like, Different little ones that are emerging over time.Discord, Open Models, and the Origins of OpenRouterSwyx [00:06:03]: Got it. And then, Ansh, no stranger to wanting more model diversity, at the time, you're a couple of years into your Anthropic journey, which we covered in the previous podcast as well. What was your introduction to Alex?Alex Atallah [00:06:16]: Well, the introduction was, I think, thirteen years before that.Swyx [00:06:20]: Oh.Alex Atallah [00:06:20]: But the OpenRouter handshake happened right over there, if you remember.Anjney Midha [00:06:23]: Yeah.Alex Atallah [00:06:24]: Which - So Alex and I, met, I believe as sophomores now, if I remember at the Stanford Review,Anjney Midha [00:06:32]: That's rightAlex Atallah [00:06:32]: Meeting for the first time.Anjney Midha [00:06:33]: I think so, yeah.Alex Atallah [00:06:35]: Yeah.Anjney Midha [00:06:35]: Yeah.Alex Atallah [00:06:35]: So Stanford Review was the libertarian newspaper on campus at Stanford that Peter Thiel started back in the day. And, whatever-- for whatever reason, I, Alex and I both showed up to one of the meetings, and I remember, the editor-chief was a mutual friend of ours. Lisa was really a really great editor-chief, where, part of an editor-chief's job is to assign responsibilities to people and make sure the work gets done. and I, I may be misremembering the details, but I remember wanting to. It was surprising to me that at the time there was no dedicated technology section in the newspaper.Alex Atallah [00:07:11]: YouSwyx [00:07:13]: Because it's political, right?Alex Atallah [00:07:14]: It is primarilySwyx [00:07:14]: Like, it's talkingAlex Atallah [00:07:15]: It originally started as like aAnjney Midha [00:07:16]: Yes.Swyx [00:07:17]: Yeah, states and all those things.Alex Atallah [00:07:17]: Correct.Swyx [00:07:18]: Yeah.Alex Atallah [00:07:18]: But it, - To take us back in time, you may remember this, but, there was this technology, legislation that was being debated called, the Net Neutrality Act. And net neutrality is, like, inherently this political concept, right? It's, it's about the regulation of - internet broadband access. And so there was a community of us who were technologists, but also debating the politics of the technology. And I thought the Review would be a great place - to, like, write about that. And I was working on, I think, a net neutrality article, and I remember proposing, “Well, maybe we should start a technology section.” And Alex was one of the only people who said, “Yes, that would be cool.” And said. I forget whether we ended up writing stuff together, but - that's when we first met,Alex Atallah [00:08:03]: Was 2011 or twelve. I forget which year it was. It was one of those.Anjney Midha [00:08:09]: Yeah.Alex Atallah [00:08:09]: It was at Old Union, if I remember correctly.Alex Atallah [00:08:11]: That's where we used to meet. But, along the way, Alex and I have had a chance to, To hang out often. And probably the time when we had the most professional overlap was when I was running the platform at Discord, and it had become this explosive platform for cryptoSwyx [00:08:32]: YeahAlex Atallah [00:08:32]: And NFTs in the middle of the pandemic.Swyx [00:08:35]: Which also, by the way, you were in charge of safety and security as well, right?Alex Atallah [00:08:38]: I was the head of platform, which meant all of the crypto - the DAO and NFT launch security debugging fell onSwyx [00:08:45]: And their phishing and.Alex Atallah [00:08:47]: The phishing, the social engineering attacks, the katana DDoS that we were getting hit by. but it's around the time I first started teaching security at scale at Stanford, CS 153. And Alex was on the, - at OpenSea at the time, and I was trying to figure out how we could defend against all these attacks that we were. Like, and at peak, I forget, if you remember how much NFT volume was running throughSwyx [00:09:10]: DiscordAlex Atallah [00:09:10]: Discord, but it was, like, a meaningful amount of, like, it was, like, several billion dollars in NFT volume of GMV, so to speak, were running through the platform, and it was all coming from OpenSea. It was these, like, buy, sell,Swyx [00:09:20]: TheAlex Atallah [00:09:21]: ServersSwyx [00:09:21]: The D in DAO is Discord.Alex Atallah [00:09:25]: Yes. And so that's when I think we had hung out professionally. But a year after that, OpenAI gave Discord early access to GPT. Sorry, three. No, it was five. Yeah, five, which is the RL version of three. And that's around the time we made a Discord bot with, OpenAI for internal deployment, and that's when I realized we would need. Like, since I was part of the deployment team.Anjney Midha [00:09:50]: What was the use case?Alex Atallah [00:09:51]: There were two that were. And there's, there's a post now called “Discord is Your Place for AI with Friends” that somebody sent me recently that I wrote, and published in twenty-three. But There were two use cases. One was Clyde, which was the - like, a party friend inside of Discord that could help you set up your Discord server and talk to you about onboarding and get your friends to hang out more. and then there was content moderation. And one of the realizations we had with content moderation was - it would refuse to moderate. Like, it would just refuse our prompts because the The training was. We were very early in the training era, and it would just. Our prompts would trigger it, its, like, guardrails. And we told OpenAI, “Hey, guys, we need access to the weights because if we're gonna be doing content moderation at scale, we had 250 million monthly active users, we need more reliability that the model will do what we need it to.” And they said, “Well, sorry, guys, that's not how this works. We're a closed-source company.” And so that was my first realization that we needed open models, and the enterprises would need more control over capabilities, and then ultimately would need some control plane or management system to orchestrate these open models. But there weren't no good - there were no good open alternatives until maybeAlex Atallah [00:11:10]: Six months later when Llama came out. And six months after that, I led the series A into Mistral, which was started by Guillaume and the Llama team. And - That, - Around that time is when I remember hearing about Alex launching OpenRouter and going, “These worlds are gonna collide, and I don't know when it'll make sense to team up.” But Alex was so early and could see. I think he was totally right about this ecosystem starting with Llama that then needed, like, a, an easy layer to manage for, especially for. I was approaching it from the enterprise perspective because I had been that, like, the. As the VP of platform at Discord, it was my job to ensure that when we deployed models to, like, 250 million users, they did what we wanted them to. And that was very hard, because if you outsourced it to the labs and they controlled the guardrails and their guardrails are their safety policies. Forbid the model from responding to your prompts. That was quite catastrophic.Swyx [00:12:05]: Yeah. But what, a moderation is the thing that they want to support. And obviously, beyond that, they would - OpenAI would work with you, presumably to give you a moderation endpoint, which they offer for free.Alex Atallah [00:12:16]: It was an interesting use case, that - So they did give us a moderation endpoint. However, as you guys know, every Discord server is like a mini deployment of itself. And so the use case was instead of having human moderators that have to interpret the norms of the community, you just give the, - Often, like every, subreddit, Discord servers, public ones have their own rules that the user, the users create.Swyx [00:12:41]: Oh, yeah. We run the LinkedIn Discord in. Yeah.Alex Atallah [00:12:43]: And then humans used to read those norms and then enforce it every day manually, like observing each message in these communities. And these communities have like millions of users. So we had a 5,000+ person team globally in the, on the Discord content moderation team. These are outsourced contractors who had a really tough job. And so the idea was instead, if you could give the norms of that server To the LLM, then the LLM would do custom moderation for that server. It's almost like a, like context moderation for that server. And many of those servers' norms just violated OpenAI's rules. And so - It was like we had our own custom eval. So each server had its own custom eval. But Discord-- at the time, OpenAI's evals, we were all soAlex Atallah [00:13:28]: Primitive in our thinking about how to deploy these LLMs that often the training prompts were super handed. It said, “Oh, anything about Harry Potter, anything that has trademarked content, don'- refuse.” And if it was a fan - Harry Potter fan community, this is a real use case, that had content moderation, the LLM would just refuse.Swyx [00:13:48]: Yeah.Alex Atallah [00:13:49]: And that was just not precise enough.Anjney Midha [00:13:52]: Another one that we heard was like if someone was trying to write like a detective story, and there's one chapter with a lot of violence, like maybe someoneAlex Atallah [00:14:01]: RightAnjney Midha [00:14:01]: Like kills someone, the LLMs would just refuse to, like, help with that part of the story.Alex Atallah [00:14:07]: Yeah.Anjney Midha [00:14:07]: And then - like, we used to be like, okay, this is not like structurally inherent to LLMs. There must be, like, some choice out there so that I can, like, switch to another model, when I'm getting, like, a refusal or a bad result from the main one that I have. And that, like, tension also drove me for a marketplace.Why “One Model Wins” Was the Wrong BetSwyx [00:14:28]: Yeah. I think that is well accepted now. What was it like back then when you were raising or, starting this? did people get it? what was the, some of the struggles? I like getting stories out of him about how other VCs don't get it. So like anything you wanna, talk about, now - Let's, let's call it, that the early journey of OpenRouter is done, right? You can obviously talk about some of the early days stuff.Anjney Midha [00:14:54]: Well, I was gonna say that, like, the biggest objection we got is big model win, which is - all of theSwyx [00:15:03]: Scaling laws.Anjney Midha [00:15:04]: Huh?Swyx [00:15:04]: Scaling laws.Anjney Midha [00:15:05]: Yeah, scaling laws, and natural network effects are just gonna accrue to one company, which will be - It'll be a Google-style monopoly, just like how Google won the search market, by a large margin, and you'll just be fighting for scraps at the end. That was probably the biggest objection we got. it is interesting that Google won the search engine race with such a huge margin. I think, like, had there been more interesting benchmarks or had, like, search engines been, - had people, like, seen them a little bit more like LLMs where they're services that you can build companies on top of, that might not have been the case. but LLMs don't merely have a user interface. They're also, like, ways of building entirely new businesses. And, a Google-level monopoly would be like the Dutch East India Company times, quadrillion in magnitude because the whole economy ends up, like, depending on the one monopoly as well. So it didn't seem like would be a really crazy outcome if that happened. And it's also less likely because the economics of, like, creating good competitors are much, like, much more decentralizable.Alex Atallah [00:16:25]: Everything Alex said is true, And I came at it from a completely different perspective, whichSwyx [00:16:31]: Yes, this is why we're here.Alex Atallah [00:16:32]: The scaling laws were never - In my mind, were always a feature, not a bug for why OpenRouter would be very valuable. Because, I was one of the first investors in Anthropic, and it was obvious to me that other researchers in our friends - I went to grad school for machine learning, and I just had a lot of friends in the ML community who it was very obvious to us that the bitter lesson holds. And so I was like, “Oh, fantastic. Now we have at least two proof points that compute scaling works.” It was OpenAI and Anthropic. and by the time I think we decided to team up on OpenRouter, I had already invested in Mistral and Black Forest Labs and Luma. So there was multiple model companies and teams that I was, working with.Why Model Labs Struggle With DistributionSwyx [00:17:14]: But you did other modalities, whereas this is literallyAlex Atallah [00:17:16]: Across different modalities, yesSwyx [00:17:17]: Text.Alex Atallah [00:17:18]: Exactly. And it was so obvious to me that an ecosystem of different kinds of models were being created, and that this whole narrative of, like, Only one company will dominate like Google was, well, like maybe true, but one, I don't believe that. But two, there was so much extraordinary innovation happening across several different research teams. But the shared problem I was noticing across all of them was often, the research teams were fantastic at figuring out how to reason about new capabilities. They think in terms of capabilities, but never - like, are not developer mindset-oriented. Like, what happens after the training is done and the checkpoint comes out? Like, you'd be shocked how, like, similar the early training teams at OpenAI, sorry, Anthropic, BFL, Mistral, were in their, like, default approach to. Taking their research out of the, lab and scaling their impact, which is often, oh, the checkpoint is done, put it out as an API, done, and then there'd be crickets. in the case of Claude, the first Claude checkpoint was done a year before they released it internally. And then ChatGPT came out, and we decided, okay, yes, it's a good idea to release a Claude version externally.Alex Atallah [00:18:34]: And they had no plan, like no plan for how to get developers to try it out. And so if you go to the Claude one blog post, you'll notice there are, like, three developer examples for users of the API, and one is a Discord bot, and the second is Vivian, my wife's startup called Juny Learning, ‘- And then there was, like, Notion, because these were all friends of, like, the Anthropic Because that's how - like, last minute the planning was around, hey, once the model's done training, how do you get it out to the world? There was no distribution platform that understood what developers needed, all the key management, provisioning, like, simple, like, endpoint management, versioning control. Like, all these things that the scientists and researchers go, “ that's plumbing. I don't really think about it.”Swyx [00:19:15]: Implementation detail.Alex Atallah [00:19:16]: Right. And instead, Alex came at it from that perspective. And so, it was so obvious to me that, like, every single lab I was funding would spend - like, literally sometimes billions of dollars into training, and then a checkpoint would be done, and there'd be crickets, like, during early access because they're like, “Oh, that's right.”Alex Atallah [00:19:35]: It's hard to use a checkpoint to make anything. You need a whole bunch of plumbing around it to make it usable by a developer. And so by the - I think - it was so obvious to me that a distribution platform like OpenRouter was critical to have in the ecosystem if we wanted there to be competition to Google. Like, unless-- ‘cause with Google, DeepMind is done training a new checkpoint, and then they push a button, and it gets blasted out across all their surfaces from Google Docs to,Swyx [00:20:01]: Everywhere, even if I don't want it.Alex Atallah [00:20:02]: Everywhere. You wanna know about, like, on Android, like, overnight, they can deploy a new checkpoint to, like, a billion devices, right? And that invisible infra advantage, distribution advantage, most people don't realize, but until OpenRouter showed up, - you had to think about all of that yourself as a model lab. And it was very daunting. at Anthropic, I think it took, well, more than twelve months to get to our first 10 million in revenue. And in contrast with Black Forest Labs, I remember the early days, you guys had a conversation with the BFL team, and, it was so simple for OpenRouter to say, “Oh, no problem. Like, the day you launch, we can send 1 million developers to you.” that was crazy. That was like a step function change in, like, an hour.Swyx [00:20:46]: Is that a real number, a million?Alex Atallah [00:20:47]: I,Swyx [00:20:48]: Okay. All right.Alex Atallah [00:20:48]: I think today it's, like, 4 million. How many developers are on OpenRouter today?Anjney Midha [00:20:52]: Over ten,Alex Atallah [00:20:54]: Yeah.Anjney Midha [00:20:54]: Over 10 million, but, like, it's, it's hard to, youAlex Atallah [00:20:59]: I, yeah, I don't know how to. Yeah.Anjney Midha [00:21:00]: We do a lot of, like, account duping work, but, noAlex Atallah [00:21:04]: If you could get 1,000 developers, just to put in context If you get 1,000 developers who try the model on day one after you release it and just, like, do inference and give you feedback, that's a thousandAnjney Midha [00:21:15]: That's hugeAlex Atallah [00:21:16]: More developers than they knew how to get to on their own.Swyx [00:21:19]: Well, BFL had a reputation, but yes.Alex Atallah [00:21:21]: They had one in Stable Diffusion.Swyx [00:21:22]: Yeah.Alex Atallah [00:21:23]: And with Mistral, I don't know if you guys remember, but the first checkpoint they released was, like, torrents. It was, like, torrent weights.Swyx [00:21:31]: Yeah, they just put up a magnet link.Alex Atallah [00:21:33]: Yeah, there was no API.Anjney Midha [00:21:34]: Yeah.Alex Atallah [00:21:34]: Because they didn'- they weren't infra people.Alex Atallah [00:21:37]: ? Like, it's like, okay, download these weights, and you guys go figure out how to host it.Swyx [00:21:39]: Well, he has a story on his side, yeah.Anjney Midha [00:21:41]: Yeah, in addition to the, like, building a really good developer experience around it, the marketing that we do on, like, for different models is totally different and perceived totally differentlyAlex Atallah [00:21:54]: RightAnjney Midha [00:21:54]: From the marketing that a model lab does for itself.Alex Atallah [00:21:56]: Yes, 1,000%.Anjney Midha [00:21:57]: Right? We are like a, neutral layer looking at this market like it's a big dark room with all the corners completely obscure to users, and users are walking into the room and, like, feeling aroundAlex Atallah [00:22:09]: YeahAnjney Midha [00:22:09]: And trying to figure out what objects to grab off the tables and, like, build into, their companies. And it's just an insane way of working. Like, models are not products where you can just enumerate all their features onto a web page. They're all black boxes, including the open weight ones. So you need to, like, shine lights on all corners of this room, so that people can see what makes this model good, and you need the company shining that light to be a neutral third party, which is what we specialize in. So the, like. It'- In addition to developer experience, there's also, like, a very important, like, marketing and product packaging componentAlex Atallah [00:22:50]: YeahAnjney Midha [00:22:50]: And a way of, like, routing and discovering models becomes, like, critical to your market as a provider or a model lab or a server tool and more in the future.“Just a Wrapper”: Why VCs Misunderstood OpenRouterAlex Atallah [00:23:03]: And this value, to your earlier point about how many VCs, like, just don't. One of my biggest frustrations is that venture capitalists, many of them, like, just don't have any operating experience in the field. so unlike a traditional investor who's just maybe come up through the ranks as, like, a associate working on financial modeling or maybe hasn't been a real operator in the field for, like, more than ten years, which is a big part of the industry now, I had just arrived at a16z, like, a year after running the platform. And so I knew what the challenges were of, like, building a real - great developer experience and like, being able to create a working piece of software with a model. And there were a few, I won't name names, but there were investors who were looking at OpenRouter, and, felt at the time, like, when I would compare notes with people, that it was just, I quote unquote, “just a marketplace.”Swyx [00:23:59]: Yeah, just a thin layer, just aAlex Atallah [00:24:00]: CorrectSwyx [00:24:00]: JustAlex Atallah [00:24:01]: A wrapper or whatever on other people's APIs. And I was like, “You have no idea how strategic the value that OpenRouter has created by being able to orchestrate even three.” APIs in production. The amount of both engineering work and community design that goes into getting that live and running in production at the scale the OpenRouter team had started just doesn't happen by default. And that was one of the things that stood out to me about Alex from the earliest days. Like, he just understood, like, - from a systems perspective, like, how do you get these flywheels going? Like, that stood out to me with OpenSea when we were working together on the NFT integration at Discord. Like, Alex had a level of community-- like, systems thinking on how you get these flywheels going that most scientists and machine learning people just don'tAlex Atallah [00:24:48]: Think of. Like, we often think in terms of training.Swyx [00:24:52]: It's a linear stage.Alex Atallah [00:24:53]: It's this linear pipeline.Swyx [00:24:53]: There's no loop yet.Alex Atallah [00:24:54]: Yeah. It wasn't until much later that the modern context feedback loop cycle really got standardized in the industry. But at the time, if you remember, machine learning was like. Like, mostly we did a lot of ML, like, when I was in grad school on a laptop. So you just, like, download a dataset, ran some ablations, and you looked at the loss curves, and you're like, “Great, I made AI.” And the idea that you have to, like, deploy those capabilities, collect feedback trajectories, then, like, put those into a continuous loop, like, came much later. And it was very counterintuitive to the - like, the traditional AI mindset. I do remember doing the investment phase for, OpenRouter, I just didn't try and educate a bunch of other VCs on why it was not just a marketplace. I was like, “ what? I'm just gonna invest.”Anjney Midha [00:25:41]: Yeah.Alex Atallah [00:25:41]: And I'm going to, like, take the opportunity to partner with Alex, and if - no other VCs get it, that's totally fine. ‘Cause at the time, - it was not obvious, I think, to several of the investors that, like, OpenRouter was not more than just a wrapper around APIs. And - that infuriated me. And I was like, “ what? I don't have time to debate you. I'm - we're gonna, we're gonna invest.” And then I think, like, a month later, Matt Murphy marked it up by 10x. Like, - I think. I forget what the exact money was and so on, but, to his credit, Menlo Ventures realized, “Okay, there's much more strategic value here as well.” Maybe you didn't hear all these conversations behind the scenes But that frustrated me a lot. there's a lot of this, like, opining about wrappers. and if you're like, “Oh, an app is just a wrapper on a model,” then, like. And, OpenRouter is, like, this wrapper on top of other APIs, and this is the most stupid, reductive framework.Alex Atallah [00:26:31]: And so it's clearly somebody who has no experience deploying product at scale.Swyx [00:26:34]: It's the thing you dismiss other things with. Like, you're a - everyone's a wrapper on everything, right? Like, and there's, there's some Some wrappers have value.Alex Atallah [00:26:40]: Investors are wrappers and LPs, right?Alex Atallah [00:26:42]: Like venture capitalists. So, yeah, it's all wrappers down, all down to bare metal, I guess, and like energy.Swyx [00:26:46]: Yeah, there - When I started the whole AI engineer, I guess, the coining, in 2023, like, that was, like, the number one pushback is that this is no value. You should just train models.Anjney Midha [00:26:56]: Right.Swyx [00:26:57]: And, yeah, obviously this is, like. you guys are one of the testaments to the fact that you can build very valuable wrappers, but also very valuable model companies.Alex Atallah [00:27:06]: It's so, hard to be. Like, the day a model launches, the fact that you have an OpenRouter, endpoint for that model frequently at the top of Hacker News on day one, people don't realize the amount of work that goes into accomplishing that. And OpenRouter used. Like, that would happen over and over again, and I remember going, “People have no idea how hard that is.”Alex Atallah [00:27:30]: That's not.Swyx [00:27:31]: Yeah, we've covered some of the inference engineering that goes behind,Alex Atallah [00:27:34]: YesSwyx [00:27:34]: Some of - with Base Ten and all those. Well, today you have, all those, like, cool code name things that people guess what Oxy Alpha is and all those things. But, like, I guess one of the things that you're teasing is, how do you get that initial flywheel going, right? Because today you have your scale and your reputation, all these things, so obviously you - you're driving immense distribution. But when you were early on, when it's mostlyBootstrapping OpenRouter Through CommunityAlex Atallah [00:27:55]: The bootstrap, yeah.Swyx [00:27:56]: Yeah.Alex Atallah [00:27:56]: What was the bootstrap like?Anjney Midha [00:27:58]: To bring it back to early Discord days, I think we, like, initially connected with. This is an OpenSea story, technically. But, and we initially connected when you were at Discord, and we talked about, like, - the Axie Infinity server.Alex Atallah [00:28:13]: Oh, yes. Yes.Anjney Midha [00:28:14]: This server was, like, the biggest server at theAlex Atallah [00:28:17]: YeahAnjney Midha [00:28:17]: At Discord.Alex Atallah [00:28:18]: That's right.Anjney Midha [00:28:19]: And you were like, constantly bumping up theAlex Atallah [00:28:22]: The limits on the server. Oh, my GodAnjney Midha [00:28:24]: Of how many people could be in the server.Swyx [00:28:24]: For those who don't know, like, 10% of Philippines was Axie.Alex Atallah [00:28:29]: Was on that server. That's a big hit.Swyx [00:28:31]: It was, like, a meaningful contributor to the GDP of the country.Alex Atallah [00:28:33]: It was an NFT, like, crypto game, but itSwyx [00:28:35]: It was like a Pokémon breeding thing.Anjney Midha [00:28:36]: Yeah.Alex Atallah [00:28:36]: Yeah. Similar. Yeah. There was battling, there was breeding, and then there was, like, a marketplace for trading.Swyx [00:28:43]: Earn as well.Alex Atallah [00:28:45]: Yeah, earn. And, like, the graphics were really cute and fun, and you like, you get emotional about your Axie that you make. So to, like, start a community like that, which we had to do many times at OpenSea with every early project, for us to create a marketplace for it, we need to make sure that the, like, the community wants it.Anjney Midha [00:29:09]: Right.Alex Atallah [00:29:09]: And it's like building something that people want and going and telling them about it. Like, you can do that on a one basis, but there's way higher leverage to do that in a community where everyone can talk to you at the same time. So we spent a lot of time, like, building things that the community really wanted. We did the same thing for OpenRouter. And, like, the Axie community was one of, like, a zillion communities we did that with. And Anj, like, saw us doing it and. ‘Cause you could just see people sharing OpenSea links constantly in that Discord. Like, users sharing links is a really clear indicator that, like, something important is going on. So we spent, a lot of time, like, first figuring out what the gap is in the technology that people care about. Like, what was the actual problem that needs to be solved? in early LLM days, it was, OpenAI refusing to finish the prompt or,Anjney Midha [00:30:09]: YeahAlex Atallah [00:30:10]: To, like, complete the task. It was also.Anjney Midha [00:30:13]: Inability to customize models. and so there are communities that, like are just completely blocked on that issue, and those are the communities that are most useful to learn about and dive into and explore.Alex Atallah [00:30:28]: Something that really struck me at that time, - as I was just hearing your talk, I remember noting - you may not remember this, but we - we had these, like working, Zoom calls that we were doing a sprint around for, like this OpenSea integration with Discord. and, we'd, we'd - it was myself, my engineering team. I think you were there. And I remember, Alex, in the middle of one of those calls, just like there was like silence. we were all like, “Oh, yeah, this totally makes sense. Let's do this.” And then there's - every, like everybody aligned. And Alex was like, “No, this makes no sense to me.” And everyone's - I remember going, “What? Like, it works. Like, you click on a link and this, then it bounces you out to, like, OpenSea.” And he was like, “It's not a good user experience. Yeah, we should not do this.” And I remember going, he was the only one person out of all of us to raise his hand and go, yes, it made sense from a technical implementation perspective. Like, we were bouncing the user out into the, into OpenSea. And so it kinda checked the box of the product manager's requirements on both sides. But Alex went one step further and was like, “ what would be better, guys? If we just embedded the experience right here inside of Discord so the link opened up as an embedded iframe, and you can just check out right there.”Alex Atallah [00:31:47]: And not one person on the call, and there's like seven of us who had met, like, week after week.Swyx [00:31:52]: And it's the guy who doesn't work for Discord.Alex Atallah [00:31:53]: And it's the guy who doesn't work for Discord.Swyx [00:31:55]: Like, technically, you benefit if they bounce.Alex Atallah [00:31:57]: Exactly. And that was, like, adversarial. To keep the user inside of Discord would be adversarial to OpenSea. And yet Alex put that user experience first. And I was like, “That's special.”Swyx [00:32:08]: Wow.Alex Atallah [00:32:08]: Because it's very hard to have somebody who's technical like Alex and understands the developer flow, but also understands the best user experience and wants to prioritize that. And that's two sides of the flywheel that if you can get spinning, like is often hard to stop. And you just reminded me, like that one was one of those moments where I go, I - I realized I gotta be better at user experience because I should have been the one who came up with that, and I didn't. And I learned from you. And, I think that went into one of our case studies for the PM training program at Discord.Swyx [00:32:34]: Whoa.Alex Atallah [00:32:36]: I don't know if it there is Because ofSwyx [00:32:38]: You need an Alex is the conclusion.Alex Atallah [00:32:40]: Yeah. You need an Alex. And this is why I'm not, nobody should be surprised why Stripe decided like they had to buy OpenRouter because it's a really rare combination of people who understand the machine learning community, the developer experience, and the user experience. And putting all that together has resulted in this extraordinary scale that very few other marketplaces have been able to achieveWindow AI, BYOM, and Finding the Right Form FactorSwyx [00:33:02]: Yeah.Alex Atallah [00:33:02]: Over the last, five years.Swyx [00:33:04]: Yeah. Well, we should talk about the other reasons for acquisitions, whichAlex Atallah [00:33:07]: Yes, we should.Swyx [00:33:07]: You've written about. I wanna proceed somewhat chronologically as well. So - there is a point that, one of the questions that, Dave from H of Zero sent in was, when did it - really started to work? And you brought up Mixtral. I don't know if you wanna bring up that story.Alex Atallah [00:33:22]: Oh, yeah.Swyx [00:33:23]: Which obviously you overlap with, so.Anjney Midha [00:33:26]: Yeah, the MoE was. I don't know when. there's no like one moment where I was like, “Oh, this is, officially starting to work.” It wasSwyx [00:33:36]: The moment where you had a Chrome extension, like, really super early on.Anjney Midha [00:33:39]: Oh, yeah. But, well, - yeah. So before OpenRouter, I wanted to, like, explore a bring-your-own-model experiment. And,Swyx [00:33:47]: Which anyone familiar with crypto is like, yeah, Phantom and all these things.Anjney Midha [00:33:50]: Yeah. So it felt like doing a MetaMask analogy for AI would be a fun way of exploring that. And at the time, there were no AI apps. There were probably as many AI apps that were, like, hitting AI - like, hitting an LLM via an API call as there were, like, games just doing it in JavaScript. like there was a, there was a moment in time where it could have been the case that web apps call LLMs through the browser, like through some desktopAlex Atallah [00:34:27]: Yes.Anjney Midha [00:34:27]: Managed app that is controlled by the user. and of course, there are like, I think, many reasons that did not happen. But back when the days were that primordial, I built a Chrome extension called Window AISwyx [00:34:43]: With Plasmo.Anjney Midha [00:34:44]: With Plasmo.Swyx [00:34:45]: I had come across early on, and I was like, “Who's gonna use this?” You did.Anjney Midha [00:34:49]: Plasmo had a couple, like, I think Phantom was using it. there were some other, like real companies using it.Alex Atallah [00:34:56]: It was like a shim.Swyx [00:34:57]: React for Chrome extension. It compiles to allAnjney Midha [00:35:00]: Yeah.Alex Atallah [00:35:00]: I see.Anjney Midha [00:35:00]: Like Next.js for Chrome extensions.Swyx [00:35:01]: Next.js, Next.js.Alex Atallah [00:35:02]: Okay.Anjney Midha [00:35:03]: And yeah, built Window AI on top of it. The creator of Plasmo, like started contributing code to Window AI, in GitHub, and that turned out to be Louis VicchiAlex Atallah [00:35:15]: Oh, you'Anjney Midha [00:35:15]: Who is the founder of OpenRouter.Alex Atallah [00:35:17]: That's right. You have told me this is how you met Louis. Yes.Anjney Midha [00:35:19]: Yeah.Alex Atallah [00:35:19]: Okay.Anjney Midha [00:35:20]: So, that allowed users to like configure which model they wanted to use for a web page in their browser, and then, like the app would just call out to that model when it needed to do things. not the right form factor for LLMs, but, it's like fun experiment. You learn a lot, and like I open sourced it. And the main learning is like, okay, this has to be an API, and it has to look a little bit - like, there has to be more of a developer experience here and more of a discovery experience as well. Like, I don't know where to use these models, and a little Chrome extension is not gonna help me discover. It's not enough real estate. I need more space. I need visuals. I need graphs. I need, examples. I need images. I need to, like, I need to be able to, like explore both as a human and as an agent.Crypto, Midjourney, and the Early Generative AI EcosystemAlex Atallah [00:36:10]: Yeah.Anjney Midha [00:36:10]: So that's how OpenRouter came to be.Alex Atallah [00:36:13]: A meta point that.Alex Atallah [00:36:16]: I think is underappreciated, but Alex is reminding me, is that we were quite lucky that we were so. we were, like, adjacent to the crypto community in those days. Because in hindsight, crypto ended up being like a dress rehearsal for generative models, right? If you think about the Axie experience, Alex is totally right, there were not that many AI apps at the time. And while I was dealing-- my job was to be the head of platform at Discord, which meant to be a general purpose place for communities and friends to create-- for developers to create apps and bots and, other services that could be deployed across Discord. And while 80% of the attention at the time was being spent on crypto, because that's where all the NFT volume was, there was, like, twenty percent of my time I was spending with a friend, who would get hotbot with me and ask me for. We would play Magic: The Gathering on weekends, and he was working on a little Discord bot that could take a text input and turn it into an image, and it was called Midjourney. YouSwyx [00:37:15]: Is that David?Alex Atallah [00:37:15]: It was David Holz.Alex Atallah [00:37:16]: He was a good friend. And David and I have both been failed ARVR founders, in the before that. And, I remember this. Midjourney was one of the fastest-growing communities we had after Axie Infinity started to peter off. And many of the, like, the abstractions and the infrastructure decisions we made to scale Axie happened just in time because they. Axie did this and then fell off a cliff. And then as Midjourney was taking off, we, like, explicitly decided to help David make the server, the Midjourney server, as the primary place for interaction with the model, because it was very hard for people to understand how to use the model if they couldn't see other people using it and copy them. And so the single-player Midjourney web app on its own, like midjourney.com, had, like, terrible retention because people would show up, they'd see this empty field. It's like E 2, and they would type in, like, cat or dog. And it was, like, paralyzing for them to have this blank canvas that they had to fill because they'd never used an AI model before. But instead, in a Discord server, you could see other people using it and riff off of their prompt, and the engagement was off the charts. And so scaling, Midjourney from zero to, like, 10 million monthly actives was a much smoother approach Axie Infinity. And so,Swyx [00:38:29]: Don't forget the best of four pictures, and you choose one.Alex Atallah [00:38:31]: The best, yeah, and then the other, weSwyx [00:38:32]: Which is the feedback loop.Alex Atallah [00:38:33]: The RLHF feedback loop, which, by the way, separately, like, Tom Brown, David and I used to play Magic: The Gathering on weekends. And so, like, it was one group of friends would hang out, and we'd. Like, these concepts were all being discussed all the time. But, there was.Alex Atallah [00:38:47]: I think there were few of us who bridged both the crypto worlds and the AI worlds. And compared to crypto, where it was - the question was always, what's the use case, for this technology? There was never any need to ask that for AI because it's, like, the use case was so visceral. It was like, I can create now anything at - I can imagine. I can write novels, I can code. And the infrastructure that those of us who believed in the distributed systems, like, value of crypto, like the censorship resistance part, found this use case that was explosive. And I think between Midjourney, the, Claude was a Discord bot launch, that we were using internally as an LLM. ElevenLabs had a TTS model that we had on Discord as well. Like, Discord became this petri dish for, like, early apps to innovate. And I don't think it's a coincidence that they found a home there before OpenRouter gave the world, like, a public home store or, like, a, storefront. Discord was this, like, almost petri dish storefront that - had, like, piggybacked on the infra we'd built for crypto communities. And then I think Alex was one of the first people to realize, wait a minute, like, these apps need their own home, on the internet. And then OpenRouter, to me, was a continuation of that community's needs. And of course, there was the crazy distribution that you enabled for a lot of these developers.Why OpenRouter Couldn't Just Live Inside DiscordSwyx [00:40:07]: So then my question is, how come you were. My perception is OpenRouter is not that Discord-centric, right? You have a Discord.Anjney Midha [00:40:14]: Yeah.Swyx [00:40:14]: And you use it to engage your community, but it's not like Midjourney where, like, no, that is like the primary way people experience OpenRouter.Anjney Midha [00:40:21]: Yeah, Midjourney, like, it really helps to see visually really quickly how people are using the model and how to prompt it.Swyx [00:40:29]: Yeah.Anjney Midha [00:40:29]: And I think that is partly why the server was so critical. It's like it is the user experience. It adds a ton.Swyx [00:40:36]: Yes.Anjney Midha [00:40:37]: And you can go the whole mile with just, like, prompting via Midjourney, like, the, via the Midjourney Discord server, getting your images and then sharing them and having fun. For OpenRouter, for LLMs, like, you need a lot of user experience around LLMs to make them, like, really usable.Swyx [00:40:54]: Charge point.Anjney Midha [00:40:55]: And yeah.Anjney Midha [00:40:57]: The, like, seeing the examples of other people is also not as useful because it's a lot of stuff to read. It takes a long time.Swyx [00:41:03]: Yeah.Anjney Midha [00:41:04]: You need, like, based integration. Not possible to do in a Discord server. You need, Or technic- it's possible. I shouldn't say that. It's just not a great developer experience. you need, like, - you need governance for. At the point where you got based integration, now you need governance for managing the LLMs that have access to it, the data policies, which teams. All that stuff needs a lot more than a Discord server can provide. So it's justSwyx [00:41:30]: YeahAnjney Midha [00:41:30]: It's not the right.Alex Atallah [00:41:32]: Well, in addition, you're not wrong, but also there's the very important distinction that, Midjourney was an end user application.Swyx [00:41:40]: Right.Alex Atallah [00:41:40]: And, that's why Discord, which has 250 million monthly end consumers, made, it made sense for Discord to be a host for that application experience. What I knew was gonna happen soon after Midjourney found explosive product-market fit, because we. I think when Midjourney launched, from launch to $100 million revenue run rate, it was less than eight months. And shortly thereafter, Stable Diffusion launched. And, all of us used to hang out in the Discord server. There, I think it was the,Swyx [00:42:13]: The Stability Discord?Alex Atallah [00:42:14]: It was theSwyx [00:42:16]: Yeah, LAION.Alex Atallah [00:42:16]: Yeah, the LAION Discord server.Swyx [00:42:17]: The image community that spawned Stable Diffusion.Alex Atallah [00:42:19]: The image community. Yeah. And so when Stable Diffusion came out, I realized- Oh, now other people can build their own Midjourney.Alex Atallah [00:42:27]: Because until then, Midjourney did not have an API, so they were a stack company, right? They were training their own models, and they were deploying them as an application. But if you wanted to build your own Midjourney, there was no API of that quality. and I think E two was still quite primitive. Like, Midjourney had great quality. And then when Stable Diffusion came out, suddenly there was this new person who - there was - this new capability in the world, which is a developer could create their own Midjourney. And that, I think, created the need for something like OpenRouter, because then you need an API to. If you - if you had the creativity of David Holz and you had Stable Diffusion as the model and you wanted to put these things together, how could you do that without having to figure out how to host the weights? And what OpenRouter, - the shape of OpenRouter enabled is that. Right? When you have open model alternatives to closed applications, OpenRouter's value in the world becomes extraordinary because now any developer can just show up and use theStable Diffusion and the Need for a Model API LayerSwyx [00:43:20]: You just love model diversity.Anjney Midha [00:43:21]: Did you just say the shape of OpenRouter?Alex Atallah [00:43:23]: Oh, no.Anjney Midha [00:43:25]: Were you in cloud? What is this the real Han?Alex Atallah [00:43:26]: I've been, I've been - I'm, I'm misaligned now. I've been overtrained. I've been using Cloud way too much, haven't I?Swyx [00:43:34]: Claude-ish is what people would say.Alex Atallah [00:43:35]: Claude-ish. Oh, God, I gotta untrain myself.Swyx [00:43:38]: Okay. - And I just wanna cap off the Mistral side. my TLDR is there was a Mistral price war, is what they called it, right? Like, round about NeurIPS is twenty-three or twenty-four.Mistral and the Birth of the Inference MarketplaceAnjney Midha [00:43:47]: Yes. DecemberSwyx [00:43:48]: They launched, the Mistral 8x7B, and like the price went down like 80%.Anjney Midha [00:43:54]: Yeah.Swyx [00:43:54]: To me, that's very positive because it's like the first, like, real competition to host Mistral. Is there more?Anjney Midha [00:44:01]: Yeah, that was. I'm, like, trying to remember it, all the things that happened. It. Like, we saw that model come out and immediately saw people say that it was the best model in the world.Alex Atallah [00:44:15]: Yes.Anjney Midha [00:44:15]: Like, this was, to my knowledge, the first time an open weights model was called that in real seriousness.Swyx [00:44:22]: It's hype, right? Is it?Anjney Midha [00:44:25]: It was hype. It was hype. It was also, like, hype from AI influencers at the time. And there were many examples where it was, like, outperforming four. So people really wanted to try it out and see, is this gonna be true for me too? And if so, at what price? And, the, like, inference landscape was really messy.Alex Atallah [00:44:49]: Yes.Anjney Midha [00:44:50]: We cleaned it up. - it allowed, like, providers to compete on price, so we could give you just the best price in one spot. And so it was, I think, the first clear example of, like, a provider marketplace working in a way that adds value to end developers.Alex Atallah [00:45:08]: Sean, you may not remember this, but I think we met for the first time a few days after Mistral came out at NeurIPSAnjney Midha [00:45:15]: Yeah.Alex Atallah [00:45:15]: At a luncheon.Swyx [00:45:16]: Yeah. That's where I also met BFL as well. Yeah.Alex Atallah [00:45:18]: And Guillaume was there.Swyx [00:45:19]: Yeah.Anjney Midha [00:45:19]: I was at NeurIPS at that time.Alex Atallah [00:45:20]: You were there too. And, we had just announced the Mistral investment, and I remember Guillaume was over there, and I remember turning to Guillaume and asking him, Like, “Is it is all the. Like, how are you feeling after the launch of Mistral and seven B?” And, him in his typical French fashion was like, “ it's a, it's an okay model. It's not that good.” And I was like. It was so, in contrast. But I remember him also saying that part of the reason he felt a lot of people Thought that it was better than four was because of the speed. - it was an MoE model that they had, like, absolutely figured out how to make super efficient. It was on the Pareto frontier. And this is an important thing about LLMs, right? Sometimes when they're faster, you think they're smarter, even though, like, if you did, N of, these common, like, evals that are - you do seven tries, and I don't remember. I think we should go back and figure out what the data says, but I wouldn't be surprised if it turns out, oh, on an N of seven attempts, four was smarter on evals, but the perception of on, like, or correctness would be smarter or more accurate. But, people, like, from a human preference perspective felt that it was faster because it - or smarter because it's so fast.Swyx [00:46:36]: Yeah. And most queries do not take that levelAlex Atallah [00:46:39]: Don't take that. That's true.Swyx [00:46:40]: Right? So this is the start of humans as routerAlex Atallah [00:46:42]: Yes.Swyx [00:46:42]: Which then eventually becomes OpenRouter as router of like theAlex Atallah [00:46:45]: Oh, that's interesting way to think about it. Yeah.Swyx [00:46:47]: Like, because humans are the routing mechanism. Like, I will ask the fast model first, and then if, like, oh, not good enough, I'm gonna upgrade manually.Alex Atallah [00:46:52]: Yes.Swyx [00:46:53]: But then he's gonna auto it.Alex Atallah [00:46:54]: I didn't, I hadn't thought of it that way, but that makes sense.Swyx [00:46:57]: Which then there's, there's a lot more techniques, like fusion. Fusion is the thing that we should talk about. Before I move on to those things, I just want to close off the early years. one thing that I observe, which you are also an investor in Arena.OpenRouter vs. LM ArenaAlex Atallah [00:47:10]: Right.Swyx [00:47:10]: And we talked about Midjourney having that feedback loop of, A, B, C, D, and choosing that very. being very important. And you understand the flywheel. So how come you didn't build Arena, and how come Arena didn't build OpenRouter?Anjney Midha [00:47:23]: Well, Arena started before OpenRouter, right?Swyx [00:47:27]: They had the school projectAnjney Midha [00:47:29]: Yeah, LMSwyx [00:47:29]: And then it became a company.Anjney Midha [00:47:31]: LM Arena, yeah.Swyx [00:47:32]: So, but, and I know you had some Arena experiences, like the up comparison type things.Anjney Midha [00:47:37]: Yeah.Swyx [00:47:37]: But you never really went as hard as Arena did.Swyx [00:47:40]: And,Anjney Midha [00:47:40]: In doing up experiences?Swyx [00:47:42]: Yes. And LM Arena did have a router project based on LM Arena ELOs, which they never commercialized.Anjney Midha [00:47:48]: It's hard to do a company that does both because one company is taking data and selling it, and the other company really can't by default. So, I think there is, like, a branding reason that there are two companies here. like, when you set up OpenRouter, there's no training, there are no prompts, right, aside from what your provider policy set. Like, OpenRou- like, OpenRouter can't see your prompts or completions. If you want to see that as an org, you have to opt into it and enable it. And so we're, like, pretty conservative and careful about data policy and security. And privacy. And LM Arena is like, their business model is like oriented around the labs and,Swyx [00:48:34]: Because they give it for free, right? You don't give it for free to give it for free.Anjney Midha [00:48:37]: Yeah.Anjney Midha [00:48:38]: But we do give some. We like have free endpoints too, but like those free endpoints, we, I think we're not collecting any prompts. We're not like monetizing the data unless you, opt into it for some reason.Alex Atallah [00:48:48]: This comparison. you're not the first person to ask me this, and Alex knows this, but I was the interim, like the founder, like first CEO of Arena for the first five months when, and we were helping Anastasios and Waylin spin out of Berkeley. And, I did invest in that before, OpenRouter, but it was very strange to me the comparisons that outside, folks would make between the two projects because the missions were completely different. The founding entity for Arena, we called it the AI Reliability Institute because it was there as an eval service. Like the data, so to speak, that they were originally, offering the labs was how do you make the evaluation of models more reliable than like the state of the art at the time, which was like really just finger in the wind.Alex Atallah [00:49:38]: That's what Anastasios and Waylin's PhD work was as scientists at Berkeley, was on statistical methodologies for correcting, eval estimates, based on like intrinsic biases and how you collected the data.Swyx [00:49:54]: Yes.Alex Atallah [00:49:54]: AndSwyx [00:49:54]: Style control.Alex Atallah [00:49:55]: Style control and stuff like that. And which is very much like a, hey, how. If you're a scientist and you're trying to. the highest expectation customer for Arena was always like a training and, like a researcher at a lab. Whereas the highest expectation customer from my perspective that Alex like really understood and was the mission was to serve was like a developer, right? Who then takes the result of the research and then produces an application that's deployed to the world. It was a completely different problem and person that these two teams were focused on. And so from the outside in. I don't know if you remember this, but I have a distinct memory of a few weeks before we did the term sheet, together for OpenRouter, I'd given you a call because we were trying to get a pooled data set together from OpenRouter and from Arena to, create like an open source repository of prompts. these projects were so different in their goals that it was totally normal to me to be like, “Oh, yeah, let's call Alex and see if he'd want to team up on pooling data,” because they're so different. We need. We don't have that data at all. We. Like, we didn't have API prompts. We didn't, we didn't have like what developers want to do with the models, which is very different from what researchers inside a model lab want to do before releasing the model.Swyx [00:51:15]: Yeah.Alex Atallah [00:51:15]: Does that make sense? And so to this day, I think you see that this difference, even though at a 30,000-foot level you could. I guess you could conclude that Arena and OpenRouter are adjacent, but, the roadmaps, the missions and so on at the time at least were like in very different directions.Swyx [00:51:36]: That ideal customer, I get. I totally get that.Alex Atallah [00:51:39]: Yes.Swyx [00:51:39]: As a founder, I want to own everything, right?Alex Atallah [00:51:41]: That's possible.Swyx [00:51:42]: Like this is clearly an adjacency that I'm like gonna explore that.Anjney Midha [00:51:45]: Own everything meaning like you don't know what to do yet, so you wanna like make sure you catch PMFocus, Anthropic, and Roads Not TakenAlex Atallah [00:51:51]: No, I think what heAnjney Midha [00:51:52]: As quickly as possible.Alex Atallah [00:51:53]: You want to own the entire infrastructure space, and so you expand to whatever demand you can capture.Swyx [00:51:58]: You want to have a play in each end.Alex Atallah [00:51:59]: Yeah, I think that's, that's hard, in reality, because serving multiple customers is difficult.Swyx [00:52:05]: Clearly, this is the one focus, right?Alex Atallah [00:52:08]: Yeah.Anjney Midha [00:52:08]: Yeah. I still think even in the age of AI, like focus is,Alex Atallah [00:52:12]: Is criticalAnjney Midha [00:52:13]: Underrated and critical, not just because you end up with a better product by focusing your humans on it, but also because the world knows what your focus is.Alex Atallah [00:52:22]: One thousand percent.Anjney Midha [00:52:23]: The world can map like, “Oh, I have this issue. Which brand out there is going to help me with that issue? This is the brand that's known for that focus.”Alex Atallah [00:52:31]: Yes.Anjney Midha [00:52:32]: So like if I want real attention on this issue, like this really matters to me, I should go with the brand that cares the most about it.Alex Atallah [00:52:39]: To underscore Alex's point about how important focus is, in the early days of Anthropic, it was not easy to. Like people think that the early days of Anthropic were like super easy because they were on their 3 guys who left, but it was very

It is not difficult to see when reading the Bible that God is a deliverer. Time and time again He delivers His people from difficulties and tribulations of this life. However, there are times that His people didn’t experience some great earthly deliverance. In this sermon, Brother Luke looks at a moment of deliverance that …

Recently, I began a series on the book of Ephesians. This book contains a perfect balance of doctrine and practice. Here is the first message in that series. 09.06.26.Welcome.to.Ephesus.Tim.McCool

In the Wednesday night Bible profile series, I come to Joshua. From a slave in Egypt to the first appointed general of the Israelite army, Joshua led an amazing life. Eventually appointed by God to take Moses place, Joshua’s life is an incredible testimony to courage and steadfast leadership. 09.09.26.Bible.Profile.of.Joshua.Tim.McCool

In a follow up message to “Leading Others to Christ”, I look at the Bible teaching on what we are really supposed to be doing. Did God command us to make children for Him or did He command us to lead His born-again children into discipleship? We are not given the task of making children …

In this episode of Words of Grace, we return to Jesus' teaching in Matthew 25 concerning the acts of mercy shown by His people. We consider the expectation that God's people show mercy to others, and how these acts are not a means of earning salvation, but evidence of the work of God's grace in … Continue reading "Expanding on Acts of Mercy (Part 1) | Matthew 25"

Pauline Hanson says doesn’t want to upset anyone and regrets comments where she called Aboriginal people ‘primitive’. Plus, Apple introduces age verification on its devices in Australia. Read more: Hanson sorry for ‘most primitive’ slur Apple now requires Australians to prove their age for 18+ apps and contentSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In a message from our Wednesday service, Bro. Byron Fair, member of Zion PBC, preached for us. He shared with us from the writings of Peter about how we often feel out of place in this world as Christians, and what we should do about it. 08.26.26.Feeling.Out.of.Place.Byron.Fair

In this week’s episode of Words of Grace, we share the second part of our study from Matthew chapter 25, in which we consider Christ's words to the sheep, gathered on His right hand in the final judgment at the end of time. More specifically, we consider the evidences of God’s work in their lives; … Continue reading "The Judgment, from Matthew’s Gospel (Part 2)"

Its dinosaurs! Its Vietnam! Its a War Movie!

In this first episode of a two-part study from Matthew chapter 25, we consider one of the most solemn subjects in all of Scripture: the final judgment. When the Son of Man returns in His glory, accompanied by all the holy angels, He will sit upon the throne of His glory. The dead will be … Continue reading "The Judgment, from Matthew’s Gospel (Part 1)"

Mike Aquilina and Bear sit down to talk story about the early primitive Church and the Eucharist. They discuss what the early Mass used to look like through Mike's book The Mass of the Early Christians. Mr. Aquilina explains how us as Catholics the Mass is the source and summit of our spiritual life and we draw strength from Mass. It gives us strength because the Lord is present with us in the Eucharist. The Lord makes himself present to us in the breaking of the bread. Full Episodes! https://www.amazon.com/gp/video/detai...https://www.bearschoolofmanliness.com/Full Episodes! https://www.amazon.com/gp/video/detai...https://www.bearschoolofmanliness.com/SUBSCRIBE & SHARE BEAR'S VIDEOSWEBSITE DeepAdventure.ComNEWEST BOOK "12 Rules for Manliness | Where Have All the Cowboys Gone" on Amazon or Bear's Online Store https://my-site-100622-104377.square....DONATE TO THE CAUSE: https://www.paypal.com/donate?hosted_...PATREON EARLY RELEASE OF CONTENT HERE:   / bearwoznickdeepadventure  FACEBOOK : https://www.facebook.com/BearWoznick/...#Jesus #Catholic #Faith #Hope #Love #God

Leading others to Christ is a relatively modern evangelical Christian term. But is it a Biblical term? This phrase / idea evolved in the 20th century and carries the idea of bringing a non-child of God to a moment in which they become a child of God. But is this found in the Bible? And …

We've all watched a kid "check out" and assumed they weren't trying — or weren't smart enough. This week, Teresa and Mark Lubovich blow that up. They run a learning center built on one radical tagline: connection before content. Their students don't get better at math because they get smarter; they get better because they finally feel safe enough to think. Glenn connects it straight to the Connection Codes protocol — intense emotion shuts down cognition, unprocessed emotion hinders it, and then gets honest about his own story of being called "dumb" as a kid and carrying that fear into his sixties. If you're a parent, grandparent, teacher, or just someone who's ever felt like you were "doing it wrong," this one names something you've felt your whole life.In this episode:•Why "connection before content" changes everything about how kids (and adults) learn•The "ladder" of learning: core, processing, and executive function (and why we start at the bottom)•Primitive reflexes and the Moro (fight-or-flight) response — the kids who look fine but are holding their breath inside•How curiosity and identity get lost between age two and age ten — and what brings them back•Glenn's own story: fear of failure, fear of judgment, and the exhaustion of learning something new.About Teresa & Mark Lubovich: Teresa and Mark run a learning center that partners with students and families across the country and internationally, using assessments and directed programs to build the foundational skills: regulation, processing, executive function — that traditional tutoring can't reach. Longtime friends of Connection Codes, they've woven the Core Emotion Wheel into how they work with every student and family. Their guiding belief: program or not, kids need connection, regulation, and safety first.Resources mentioned:Teresa & Mark's website → https://brightheartlearning.com/Teresa & Mark's email: info@brightheartlearning.comTheir "ladder of learning" chart → https://drive.google.com/file/d/1M6DJqiTZArA6WqJtYkYDCPXcpPXe07S9/view?usp=sharingThe Core Emotion Wheel (free download) → https://connectioncodes.co/cew

Jesus tells us in the book of John that we shall have tribulation. It is unavoidable and no person is exempt. Knowing we will face afflictions and difficulties in this life, how are we prepared to handle those moments when they come? In this sermon Brother Luke looks at how a child of God can …

Back in March I began a series on “fundamentals of the faith.” The 1st and 2nd messages are on the podcast if anyone would like a refresher on that series. At long last, here is the 3rd message in that series – Limited Atonement. In this message, I look at the purpose of why Christ …

In the second part of our study from Ephesians chapter 4, we continue considering the Apostle Paul’s picture of the Christian life as a change of apparel. That is, we should put off the old man and put on the new, replacing our former traits with the behaviors pleasing to Christ. Paul gives us a … Continue reading "A Change of Apparel, Part 2"

This is a rerun of an episode that originally aired in 2024. "Sorority House" (February 8, 1961) A few times on this podcast, we've bent over backwards to find a gay interpretation of a sitcom that never did anything gay, but this is not one of those. Mister Ed was developed by Arthur Lubin, a closeted gay director who was married to a woman but eventually ended up cohabitating with a male companion. It's interesting, then, that he'd be into making a TV show out of a story about Wilbur Post, who's married to a woman and who's outwardly a traditional guy even if his most significant relationship is with a male — a horse, but a male nonetheless — that he has to keep secret. Primitive though it might be, Mister Ed is actually the blueprint for more traditional magic sitcoms like Bewitched and I Dream of Jeannie. You can watch this episode of Mister Ed for free on archive.org.

We are all faced with moments of temptation. In those times Satan is trying to entice us to disobey God. He is masterful at his craft and so subtle, until we often don’t even realize in that moment what is happening. In this sermon Brother Luke looks at those moments and how to prepare ahead …

Pro skater Paul “P-Rod” Rodriguez built Primitive Skateboarding from a Nike-exclusive sneaker shop into a $20 million skate and apparel empire, and almost none of it went according to plan. Here he breaks down the mindset he learned on a board and applied to building a brand designed to outlast his career. For more on Primitive Skateboarding and show notes click here Subscribe and watch Shopify Masters on YouTube!Sign up for your FREE Shopify Trial here.

We have probably all taken a math test where the instructions informed us, we must not only give the right answer but also show our work. Teachers do this to make us prove we understand the process that gets us to the correct answer. In this sermon Brother Luke looks at this concept from a …

In this message from Ephesians 4, we consider Paul's practical exhortation to the Christian to put off the old man and put on the new man. Using the picture of changing garments, Paul teaches us that the Christian life involves laying aside the attitudes and behaviors associated with our former way of life and being … Continue reading "A Change of Apparel, Part 1"

It has been a week for the Arizona Diamondbacks dealing with Ketel Marte’s absence, so what comes next? Can he smooth things over? Also, what will the Diamondbacks do with their injured rotation after the Michael Soroka news. That and more on the pennant chase from Alex Weiner and Dave Burns.

P is for Primitive War   This week we get together to talk about the 2025 almost-masterpiece Primitive War   Vietnam. 1968. A recon unit known as Vulture Squad is sent to an isolated jungle valley to uncover the fate of a missing Green Beret platoon. They soon discover they are not alone.

The Apostle Peter is probably the best person in the history of the world to teach us about remembering. As the one who declared he would die with Jesus, only to deny him 3 times within a few hours, no doubt Peter had personal experience with forgetting. In the first part of the message entitled …

Here is the 2nd part of the message entitled, “Remember, Remember, Remember.” 08.09.26.Remember.Remember.Remember.pt.2.Tim.McCool

In this second part of The Quiet but Bold Disciple, we continue examining the Apostle John through his interactions with Peter and his relationship with Jesus. We consider John standing faithfully at the cross while Jesus entrusts His mother to his care, and then follow Peter and John as they run to the empty tomb … Continue reading "The Quiet but Bold Disciple (Part 2)"

In this message, we begin a study of the Apostle John, one of the “sons of thunder” who is often overshadowed by the more outspoken Apostle Peter. Yet as we follow John through the Gospel accounts, we discover a disciple whose quiet and humble character was accompanied by remarkable boldness and faithfulness. We consider the … Continue reading "The Quiet but Bold Disciple — Part 1"

SOMETIME AROUND 1908, a resident of south Clatsop County — probably from the hamlet of Arch Cape — got sick and tired of dealing with Hug Point, and decided to do something about it. — It was a decision that had some unintended consequences — because it led directly to the law that made Oregon's beaches public property.... (Arch Cape, Clatsop County; 1900s, 1910s) -- #ofor #oregonHistory #ORhistory -- 05 Jan 2025 -- By Finn J.D. John" /> (For text and pictures, see https://offbeatoregon.com/2501a1011e.hug-point-road-osWest-beaches-683.099.html)

Here is part 2 of Green Pastures… 07.26.26.Green.Pastures.pt.2.Tim.McCool

For sheep to grow, they must be free from certain things. In this message, I look at how sheep are able to rest and grow in green pastures. Here is part 1 of Green Pastures… 07.26.26.Green.Pastures.pt.1.Tim.McCool

In the Bible Profile series, I have now left Genesis and moved into Exodus. The most significant figure of Exodus, is of course, Moses. It would take years to cover all of the events of Moses’ life, so I chose to focus on the times we find Moses on certain mountains. 07.22.26.Moses.on.the.Mountain.Tim.McCool

In the concluding installment of this two-part message from Flint River Primitive Baptist Church, we move from the source of true peace to its practical application in the life of the believer. Having seen that God is the God of Peace and that Jesus Christ is the Prince of Peace, we now consider the blessings … Continue reading "The God of Peace (Part 2)"

In this episode, we are thrilled to sit down with the incredibly talented Julie Porter, the creative mind behind Farmhouse Cottons. Julie takes us behind the scenes of her gorgeous sewing space in Siloam Springs and shares her amazing journey into the world of primitive quilting. We chat about her mentor Sherry Payne, hilarious teaching mishaps like a literal candle fire, and the emotional connection to history and heritage that quilting brings to all of us.We also dive deep into some fun quilting tips and techniques, from Julie's unique right-side freezer paper appliqué method to Rochelle's wild plans for a graffiti-style painted quilt. Plus, Julie breaks down the story behind her popular "Christmas Bleu" pattern and we debate the ultimate question: what are your top three P's? Tune in for a warm, chatty conversation filled with laughs, creative inspiration, and a reminder of why the quilting community is so incredibly special.Send us Fan MailSupport the showFollow Leslie on Instagram at @leslie_quilts and Rochelle at @doughnutwarrior

We all have opinions and they can certainly be valuable to us. Our lives can be shaped in positive ways if we listen to the opinions of the older, wiser people in our lives. However, opinions can be dangerous and a tremendous source of strife and conflict if used recklessly. With the internet and social media, it is easier …

KEXP presents Primitive Ring performing live in the KEXP studio. Recorded May 27, 2026. The Last Goldmine Lies From The Other Side Heads Will Roll Luck In The Ground Charles Moothart - Guitar, VocalsBert Hoover - Bass, VocalsJon Modaff - Drums Audio Engineer: Kevin SuggsMastering Engineer: Julian Martlew https://primitivering.bandcamp.comhttp://kexp.org Join this channel to get access to perks:https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC3I2GFN_F8WudD_2jUZbojA/join Photo by Carlos CruzSupport the show: https://www.kexp.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The second installment of a five-part pilgrimage exploring the 2026 BIG EARS festival. The Welsh guitarist brought her "Welsh primitive" to a dive bar in Knoxville—Appalachian fingerpicking channeled through 90s punk energy, delivered barefoot and shredding by noon with thumb picks in hand. She discusses reinvention over preservation (tradition, she says, is just "good licks"), her first-ever pilgrimage to Appalachia (and its surprising links to Wales), last year's ACL-beloved Last Night I Heard the Dog Star Bark, her recent WFMU live album, and her surprisingly effective duo with the "diametrically opposed" Hayden Pedigo.Sound Propositions should be available wherever you get your podcasts, so please keep an eye out and subscribe (and rate and review, it helps others who might be interested find us). You can support Sound Propositions on Patreon if you are so inclined, or send a one-time donation via PayPal. The first two seasons are also available on Bandcamp. I'm very grateful for any support, which will help ensure future episodes.sInterviews recorded in Knoxville, 29 March 2026Produced and mixed in St Louis, July 2026LINKSGwenifer RaymondBandcampWFMUBig EarsTRACKLISTARTIST – “TITLE” (ALBUM, LABEL, YEAR)Gwenifer Raymond, “Worn Out Blues” (Strange Lights Over Garth Mountain, 2020)Orcutt Shelley Miller, “Unsafe At Any Speed” (Orcutt Shelley Miller, 2025)SP INTROGwenifer Raymond, “Bliws Afon Tâf” (Live at WFMU, 2026)Gwenifer Raymond, “One Day You'll Lie Here But Everything Will Have Changed” (Last Night I Heard The Dog Star Bark, 2025)Gwenifer Raymond, “Requiem for John Fahey” (You Never Were Much of a Dancer, 2018)Gwenifer Raymond, “The Three Deaths of Red Spectre” (The Three Deaths of Red Spectre, 2018)Nirvana, “Where Did You Sleep Last Night” (MTV Unplugged in New York, 1994)Leadbelly [Huddie Ledbetter], “In the Pines” [1944] (Where Did You Sleep Last Night?(Lead Belly Legacy Vol. 1), 1996)[soundcheck]Mississippi John Hurt, “Frankie (And Albert)” (The Early Blues Roots Of Bob Dylan, 2020)Hayden Pedigo, “Smoked” (I'll Be Waving As You Drive Away, 2025)Gwenifer Raymond, “Eulogy for Dead French Composer” (Strange Lights Over Garth Mountain, 2020)Gwenifer Raymond, “Sometimes There's Blood” (Sometimes There's Blood, 2015)Gwenifer Raymond, “Bleeding Finger Blues” (You Never Were Much of a Dancer, 2018)Gwenifer Raymond, “Bonfire of the Billionaires” (Last Night I Heard The Dog Star Bark, 2025)—-Sound Propositions is written, recorded, mixed, and produced by Joseph Sannicandro.

The Bible speaks of peace hundreds of times, but what does true peace really mean? Is it merely the absence of conflict, or is there something far deeper? In this first installment of a two-part message from the pulpit of Flint River Primitive Baptist Church, we begin a biblical study of peace from Genesis to … Continue reading "The God of Peace (Part 1)"

In the one anothering series, I look at the big picture of Jesus and John’s teachings on loving one another. I think it is safe to conclude that when we embrace what the Bible teaches on the details of loving one another, we are left without excuse! We can never say – I don’t know …

Which came first, the chicken or the egg? That is an age-old question that has baffled the minds of many. However, the Bible clearly tells us which came first. Along those same lines we ask the question…which comes first, belief or being born again. In this sermon, Brother Luke uses the scriptures to show that belief is not a means to …

To me, one of the most fascinating characters in the Bible is Judah, the 4th son of Jacob. His life is a tell-all of debauchery, betrayal, tragedy and loss. But our great God of mercy makes it clear that His grace has no bounds when it comes to His children. In the Bible profile series, …

In this concluding message on biblical fatherhood, we consider the responsibilities God has entrusted to fathers and the privilege of reflecting our Heavenly Father’s love within the home. While the world often measures success by wealth, status, or achievement, Scripture reminds us that faithful fatherhood is one of God’s highest callings. Join us as we … Continue reading "The Blessing of Fatherhood, Part 2"

CHAPTERS:00:00 - REGZ After Dark 11:38 - Favorite Animal (hummingbird) 20:35 - Who did the most fun thing? 40:27 - Michelin Stars 51:26 - Primitive Camping 59:49 - Underage Driving 1:10:25 - Joe List at Bat 1:16:27 - Spain 1:22:06 - Bobby's Ride Home 1:28:35 - Last Episode of REGZ is at Skankfest Robert Kelly, Luis J. Gomez, Joe List, and Dan Soder discuss why they have to podcast at 10:30 PM, who did the most fun thing over the weekend, petting foxes, france, waterparks, Michelin Stars, Primitive camping, driving underage, Joe List getting an at bat for a real team, spain, Bobby's long ride home, the last episode of REGZ at Skankfest, and more! Presented by YKWD and GaS Digital.  LISTEN ON APPLE PODCASTS https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-regz/id1700969607 SOCIALS Robert Kelly @ykwdpodcast https://robertkellylive.com/ https://www.instagram.com/robertkellylive/ Luis J. Gomez https://luisofskanks.com/ https://www.instagram.com/gomezcomedy/ https://twitter.com/luisjgomez Joe List https://twitter.com/JoeListComedy https://www.instagram.com/joelistcomedy/ Dan Soder https://www.dansoder.com/  https://www.instagram.com/dansoder/  SPONSORS  ChubbiesShop Chubbies' biggest sale of the season for $45 and under on Swim Trunks, Shorts, and Pants. Plus up to 65% off clearance! Get 20% off with code regz at https://www.chubbiesshorts.com/regz UltraNew customers get 15% off with code REGZ at http://takeultra.com ShopifySupport the show & sign up for your $1/month trial of Shopify. Head to https://www.shopify.com/regz BodyBrain Coffee Use code REGZ20 to get 20% off https://www.BodyBrainCoffee.com/ GLDNew customers get 40% off with code REGZ at http://GLD.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Liam is a good friend of the Bonfire and SiriusXM Talent Department big-shot. He comes in studio to address the promises Yungblud made when he was there months ago. Mr. Blud offered to party with the guys, have tea with Bobby, and invited the whole crew to his NYC show. Jay dictates what Liam should write to the label and management to ensure Yungblud comes through on all of it. | Bobby goes camping in upstate NY and nothing works out the way he planned. In less than 24 hours of roughing it, Bobby runs out of food, water, and injures himself. *To hear the full show to go www.siriusxm.com/bonfire to learn more! FOLLOW THE CREW ON SOCIAL MEDIA: @thebonfiresxm @louisjohnson @christinemevans @bigjayoakerson @robertkellylive @louwitzkee @jjbwolf Subscribe to SiriusXM Podcasts+ to listen to new episodes of The Bonfire ad-free and a whole week early.  Start a free trial now on Apple Podcasts or by visiting siriusxm.com/podcastsplus. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.