Because it's significantly cheaper. It's on the frontier at the price it's being offered, but they're not competitive in the high intelligence & high cost quadrant.
Being the number one in price vs quality, or size vs quality, is incredibly impressive, as the quality is clearly one that's very useful in "real-world usage". If you don't find that impressive there's not much to say.
If it was on the cost vs quality frontier I would find it impressive, but it's not a marker of innovation to be on the price vs quality frontier, it's a marker of business strategy
But it is on the cost vs quality frontier. The OpenRouter prices are all from mainly US(!) companies self-hosting and providing these models for inference. They're absolutely not all subsidizing it to death. This isn't Chinese subsidies at play, far from it.
Ironically, I'll bet you $500 that OpenAI and Anthropic's models are far more subsidized. We can be almost sure about this, given the losses that they post, and the above fact. These providers are effectively hardware plays, they can't just subsidize at scale and they're a commodity.
On top of that I also mentioned size vs quality, where they're also frontier. Size ≈ cost.
