How to Use Open Source AI Models (Stop Wasting Money)

And so I'm going to transition to screen share quickly to kind of go over how exactly you can use these open source models in the cloud.

And so the first thing that I'm going to share is open router.

And a lot of people have probably heard of open router.

I'm a big fan of this tool.

You know, you'll see my usage is sporadic.

So lately I've used it actually quite a bit.

I was redesigning websites.

I was redesigning landing pages.

I was doing like some vision tasks.

So when I had a lot of PDFs or images, like you said, I would default that to an open source model, do kind of those lower level tasks.

But really with open router, just quickly to even get started with this, I'll leave a link to it in the description below.

This is essentially your middleman that where you can access almost any AI model in the world that you want.

And why this is so beneficial is you create one account, you have one API key, and you can sync that one API key to Cloud Code, Codex, you know, Cursor, any IDE, any AI system that you have.

And then you can plug and play with literally hundreds of different AI models versus the alternative, Aaron, of signing up for something like z.ai. You get that API key.

Well, now you got to go to DeepSeek and get that API key and Kimmy and that, right? It's just so convoluted.

So I just want one central place like open router to store everything.

And you can browse all the different models here on open router.

You can filter by top weekly, you can filter by most popular and you can see the pricing here and notice here.

So Tencent, I think that's an open source one deep seek.

Notice the pricing of 5.6 Luna input and output.

And that's open AI's lower model, right? Compared to something like deep seek V4 flash, right? right, where we have, you know, 3 cents here per input versus 20 cents.

I mean, that's a pretty stark difference at scale, I would say, right? And you can go down the list and look at all these other models if you want.

But how to actually use this is you would create a free account on OpenRouter.

You would click API keys.

You would click create a new key, give it a name.