You can use the Claude APIs via OpenRouter with a pre-paid account.

Great points. Dont even get me started about how function calling in other LLMs costs me tokens. Something OpenAI provides OOTB. I'm also not a big fan of OpenAI's lock in. Right now I'm on a huge Claude 3 Haiku kick. That said, OpenAI does seem to get the APIs right and my hunch is the new Assistants API is going to potentially disrupt things again. Time will tell.

I would really like to see a distribution which puts all the best alternative software together:

- pyspread for a spreadsheet

- LyX for a word-processor

- OpenSCAD for a 3D modeler

- TkzEdt (or ipe) for 2D drawing

&c.

(and I'd be interested in suggestions for similar software for other tasks, esp. presentations and database work)

On reflection this thread is pretty clearly of general interest and my comment was more jargon that language, I hang out in ML zones too much.

For a broad introduction to the field Karpathy's YouTube series is about as good as it gets.

If you've got a pretty solid grasp of attention architectures and want a lively overview of stuff that's gone from secret to a huge deal recently I like this treatment as a light but pretty detailed podcast-type format: https://arize.com/blog/mistral-ai