I genuinely love how absurd the AI industry is.

Yesterday OpenAI said an internal model solved a Millennium Prize Problem. Frontier labs are racing toward something that looks like superintelligence.

Meanwhile, one layer down, the companies that sell access to those models are fighting over who gets to handle your bill.

Three weeks ago Stripe agreed to buy OpenRouter for a reported $7.5B. OpenRouter charges 5.5% on credit purchases. That fee is essentially what Stripe paid for.

The deal hasn't even closed, and the competitive answer is already here: not a smaller fee. A negative one. Straitly just opened public access to 177 AI models with 5% cashback on closed-source models and 10% on open-source.

One part of this industry is debating the future of civilization. Another part is building a rewards program.

Both are real. That's what makes this moment so strange, and so fun to watch.