River API is pitched as a cheap route to task-specific open models

Igor Babuschkin is promoting River API as a way to fine-tune open-weight models for specific tasks. He claims the resulting models can outperform GPT-6 Astra and Claude Opus 5.5 for less than 1% of the cost, but the posts provide no benchmark methods, task list or pricing calculation. Babuschkin also predicts customized open models will handle most global LLM usage within a few years.