Anthropic raises $13B Series F • Hacker News Board

Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F

#151

Post by duxup » Tue, Sep 02, 2025, 5:08 PM UTC

renegade-otter wrote: post #102

duxup wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not clear to me that each new generation of models is going to be "that" much better vs cost. Anecdotally moving from model to model I'm not seeing huge changes in many use cases. I can just pick an older model and often I can't tell the difference... Video seems to be moving forward fast from what I can tell, but it sounds like the back end cost of compute there is skyrocketing with it raising other questions.

We do seem to be hitting the top of the curve of diminishing returns. Forget AGI - they need a performance breakthrough in order to stop shoveling money into this cash furnace.

>cash furnace

They don't even burn it on on AI all the time either: https://openai.com/sam-and-jony/

Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F

#152

Post by StopDisinfo910 » Tue, Sep 02, 2025, 5:09 PM UTC

wongarsu wrote: post #110

StopDisinfo910 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alphabet 2024 revenue: 350 billions dollars Anthropic 2024 revenue: 1 billion dollars Unreasonable doesn’t even start to capture it. Anthropic being worth 10% of Alphabet is beyond insane.

So all it takes is Anthropic 35x-ing their revenue once they start selling ad spots? That sounds pretty reasonable to me. Right now nobody wants to be the first to offer advertising in LLM services, but LLM conversation history provides a wealth of data for ad targeting. And in more permissive jurisdictions you can have the LLM deliver ads organically in the conversation or just shift the opinions and biases of the m…

No, all it takes is Anthropic 35x-ing their revenue while Alphabet revenue somehow stays the same despite Alphabet already having a product perfectly competitive with Anthropic and which can use the same revenue growth strategy.

As I said, insane. And that’s not even considering the 10 to 15% shares of Anthropic actually owned by Alphabet.

Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F

#153

Post by askafriend » Tue, Sep 02, 2025, 5:10 PM UTC

matheist wrote: post #100

adamgordonbell wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In the early days of FedEx, Smith had to go to great lengths to keep the company afloat. In one instance, after a crucial business loan was denied, he took the company's last $5,000 to Las Vegas and won $27,000 gambling on blackjack to cover the company's $24,000 fuel bill. Some who take on unreasonable risk will be among the most successful people alive. Most will lose eventually, long before you hear about them i…

You know, it only just now occurs to me to wonder if the blackjack story is the public sanitized version of "how I got $24k because I'm not allowed to tell you the real version"

Great thought, that seems very likely since so many "founder stories" are heavily spun tales.

Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F

#154

Post by 1oooqooq » Tue, Sep 02, 2025, 5:10 PM UTC

code4tee wrote: post #65

Impressive round but it seems unlikely this game can go on much longer before something implodes. Given the amount of cash you need to set of fire to stay relevant it’s becoming nearly impossible for all but a few players to stay competitive, but those players have yet to demonstrate a viable business model. With all these models converging, the big players aren’t demonstrating a real technical innovation moat. Every…

you say it can't go much longer, yet herbalife is still listed.

Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F

#155

Post by vrt_ » Tue, Sep 02, 2025, 5:10 PM UTC

nradov wrote: post #53

llamasushi wrote: post #22

The compute moat is getting absolutely insane. We're basically at the point where you need a small country's GDP just to stay in the game for one more generation of models. What gets me is that this isn't even a software moat anymore - it's literally just whoever can get their hands on enough GPUs and power infrastructure. TSMC and the power companies are the real kingmakers here. You can have all the talent in the w…

That's why wealthy investors connected to the AI industry are also throwing a lot of money into power generation startups, particularly fusion power. I doubt that any of them will actually deliver commercially viable fusion reactors but hope springs eternal.

Imagine solving energy as a side effect of this compute race. There's finally a reason for big money to be invested into energy infrastructure and innovation to solve a problem that can't be solved with traditional approaches.

Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F

#156

Post by xbmcuser » Tue, Sep 02, 2025, 5:11 PM UTC

llamasushi wrote: post #22

The compute moat is getting absolutely insane. We're basically at the point where you need a small country's GDP just to stay in the game for one more generation of models. What gets me is that this isn't even a software moat anymore - it's literally just whoever can get their hands on enough GPUs and power infrastructure. TSMC and the power companies are the real kingmakers here. You can have all the talent in the w…

This is why I keep harping on the world needing China to get competitive on node size and crashing the market. They are already making energy with solar and renewable practically free. So the world needs AI to get out of the hand of the rich few and into the hands of everyone

Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F

#157

Post by JimmyBuckets » Tue, Sep 02, 2025, 5:11 PM UTC

wagwang wrote: post #145

marcosdumay wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's what wealth inequality does.

No that's what low interest rates does

This comment seems like a rebuttal which is confusing to me because they are deeply related.

Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F

#158

Post by derefr » Tue, Sep 02, 2025, 5:11 PM UTC

llamasushi wrote: post #22

The compute moat is getting absolutely insane. We're basically at the point where you need a small country's GDP just to stay in the game for one more generation of models. What gets me is that this isn't even a software moat anymore - it's literally just whoever can get their hands on enough GPUs and power infrastructure. TSMC and the power companies are the real kingmakers here. You can have all the talent in the w…

> privatization

You think any of these clusters large enough to be interesting, aren't authorized under a contractual obligation to run any/all submitted state military/intelligence workloads alongside their commercial workloads? And perhaps even to prioritize those state-submitted workloads, when tagged with flash priority, to the point of evicting their own workloads?

(This is, after all, the main reason that the US "Framework for Artificial Intelligence Diffusion" was created: America believed China would steal time on any private Chinese GPU cluster for Chinese military/intelligence purposes. Why would they believe that? Probably because it's what the US thought any reasonable actor would do, because it's what they were doing.)

These clusters might make private profits for private shareholders... but so do defense subcontractors.

Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F

#159

Post by rsanek » Tue, Sep 02, 2025, 5:11 PM UTC

code4tee wrote: post #65

Impressive round but it seems unlikely this game can go on much longer before something implodes. Given the amount of cash you need to set of fire to stay relevant it’s becoming nearly impossible for all but a few players to stay competitive, but those players have yet to demonstrate a viable business model. With all these models converging, the big players aren’t demonstrating a real technical innovation moat. Every…

I was convinced of this line of thinking for a while too but lately I'm not so sure. In software in particular, I think it's actually quite relevant what you can do in-house with a SOTA model (especially in the tool calling / fine tuning phase) that you just don't get with the same model via API. Think Cursor vs. Claude Code -- you can use the same model in Cursor, but the experience with CC is far and away better.

I think of it a bit like the Windows vs. macOS comparison. Obviously there will be many players that will build their own scaffolding around open or API-based models. But there is still a significant benefit to a single company being able to build both the model itself as well as the scaffolding and offering it as a unit.

Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F

#160

Post by jononor » Tue, Sep 02, 2025, 5:11 PM UTC

dcchambers wrote: post #125

code4tee wrote: post #65

Impressive round but it seems unlikely this game can go on much longer before something implodes. Given the amount of cash you need to set of fire to stay relevant it’s becoming nearly impossible for all but a few players to stay competitive, but those players have yet to demonstrate a viable business model. With all these models converging, the big players aren’t demonstrating a real technical innovation moat. Every…

And unfortunately, the amount of money being thrown around means that when the bottom falls out and its revealed that the emperor has no clothes, the implosion is going to impact all of us. It's going to rock the market like we've never seen before.

Hope it stays long enough to build up serious electricity generation, storage and distribution. Cause that has a lot of productive uses, and has historically been underdeveloped (in favor of fossile fuels). Though there will likely be a squeeze before we get there...