May 28, 2026
Cheap, shady, or secretly genius?
The mysterious Hy3 LLM is topping OpenRouter Model Rankings by a large margin
A mystery chatbot nobody asked for is crushing the charts, and the internet is suspicious
TLDR: Hy3 preview, a little-known AI model, has surged to the top of OpenRouter’s usage charts even though many users say it doesn’t seem especially amazing. The community is split between “people just love cheap new toys” and “something weird is going on here,” which matters because these rankings shape what tools people trust and use.
A weird new artificial intelligence model called Hy3 preview has suddenly shot to the top of OpenRouter’s rankings, blowing past fan favorite Claude by a huge margin — and the community’s reaction is basically: wait, who invited this guy? The big shock isn’t just that Hy3 is winning, it’s that almost nobody seems to have heard of it, and early hands-on tests suggest it’s fine, not fabulous. That gap between the hype and the actual performance is exactly where the comment-section drama exploded.
One camp says the answer is brutally simple: it’s cheap. As one commenter put it, Hy3 is basically the lowest-cost “decent” option, and in today’s world of expensive AI bills, that may be enough. Another user delivered the spiciest reality check of all, joking that “trying to think logically has no place in an AI discussion” because people stampede toward whatever is new and inexpensive. In other words: maybe this isn’t a miracle model — maybe it’s just a bargain-bin frenzy.
But the skeptics are having a field day too. Some pointed out that OpenRouter’s charts only show what happens inside OpenRouter, so this may not reflect the wider AI world at all. Others floated a much juicier theory: because Hy3 runs through just one provider, maybe the whole thing is some kind of ad or traffic-recycling experiment. And then came the comic relief: Simon Willison tested it and got back HTML with a “Change Pelican Color” button — instantly giving this mystery model chaotic meme energy.
Key Points
- •OpenRouter’s AI Model Rankings showed Hy3 preview and DeepSeek Flash V4 surpassing Claude in token usage, with Hy3 drawing particular attention because of its low visibility elsewhere.
- •The article links Hy3 to Tencent’s open-source release and notes that its publicly visible benchmark results on Hugging Face are not especially strong relative to other Chinese open-source models.
- •Hy3 preview is priced on OpenRouter at $0.066 per 1 million input tokens, below DeepSeek V4 Flash at $0.10 per 1 million input tokens.
- •OpenRouter usage data in the article shows no Hy3 preview usage before May 8, followed by steady usage after the model appears to have moved from a free to a paid SKU.
- •Although Hy3 has open weights, OpenRouter lists only one provider for it—Singapore-based SiliconFlow—and the article notes SiliconFlow’s usage was limited before Hy3 appeared.