Nader Khalil

The State of Model Routing — NVIDIA, Cognition, OpenRouter

Aug 6, 2026 · 48:17

Cognition's Walden Yan, OpenRouter's Alex Atallah, NVIDIA's Tanay Varshney and Carter Abdallah argue routing should orchestrate frontier and cheaper models, not per-task benchmark picks; Devin Fusion cuts Fable-level intelligence cost by 40%. Yan: task-type routing is fragile because a session shifts from codebase question to feature request to live debugging; Devin keeps a frontier model planning while a cheap sidekick executes. Atallah: OpenRouter's auto router sat unused for two years until OpenClaw heartbeats every ten minutes created an app with two intelligence needs; out-of-distribution, small models thrash: Opus scores three times better at a tenth of Haiku's cost on terminal bench. Varshney cites jagged capabilities for up to 10% higher accuracy; Abdallah adds local/cloud routing.

State of the Union: Why Local, Why Now — NVIDIA, Osmantic, Roboflow, EXO Labs, @matthew_berman

Jul 11, 2026 · 44:29

Nader Khalil (NVIDIA), Joseph Nelson (Roboflow), Alex Cheema (Exo Labs), Matthew Berman, and Ahmad Osman (Osmantic, r/LocalLLaMA) argue that local AI is now useful, driven by stronger open models and better hardware. They cite inflection points like Llama 2, DeepSeek v3, and GLM 5.2, which closed the gap with frontier cloud models. Sovereignty and control are key: enterprises need to choose their own model versions and avoid lock-in. Specialized models, such as Roboflow's fine-tuned vision models for deep-sea fish discovery, outperform general ones for specific tasks. Optimization is critical: EXO Labs achieved 10x performance on the DGX Spark by tuning existing NVIDIA kernels. The panel emphasizes that simplicity remains a barrier—most users need point-and-click solutions—and advocates for open-source AI to ensure freedom and innovation.