3p LLMs

Third-party Large Language Models (3p LLMs) are external AI engines integrated via API to power proprietary applications without the overhead of local hosting.

3p LLMs allow teams to outsource the heavy lifting of inference to specialized providers like OpenAI (GPT-4o), Anthropic (Claude 3.5 Sonnet), and Google (Gemini 1.5 Pro). By leveraging these managed services, developers bypass the $10,000+ per-node hardware costs and complex orchestration required for self-hosting models like Llama 3. This approach prioritizes rapid deployment and state-of-the-art performance through simple REST API calls. It is the standard architecture for startups and enterprises building RAG pipelines or customer-facing agents that require high-reasoning capabilities on a pay-as-you-go basis.

https://platform.openai.com/docs/models