The mysterious Hy3 LLM is topping OpenRouter Model Rankings by a large margin

A mysterious Tencent model called Hy3 has unexpectedly topped OpenRouter's rankings by token usage, surpassing Claude by over 50%, despite having mediocre benchmark results and minimal public discussion. While Hy3's lower pricing ($0.066 vs $0.10 per million tokens) partially explains its popularity, the model's inferior quality compared to top competitors and steady organic usage since switching from free to paid access in May raises questions about what's driving its dominance on the platform.