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Anthropic raises $13B Series F

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Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F

#172

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.

Valuation includes expected future growth, it's not just present value of future revenue given today's numbers. You may not agree with the market's estimation of that, but comparing just present revenue isn't really the right comparison.

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Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F

#173
post #9

I feel like the money itself makes less and less sense these days. It's just numbers that are becoming increasingly detached from the real world

Before you pat yourself on the back for being so smart and grounded... Remember, every technology you use today followed this pattern, with winners emerging that absolutely did go on to be extremely profitable for decades. Most of us remember the .com era. But in the early 1900s there was literally hundreds of automotive startups (actual car companies, and tens of thousands of supplier startups) in the metro-detroit…

And they also realize they don't need to be fantastic investments to pay off, they just need to IPO/be acquired at a higher share price.

Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F

#174
post #72

Substitute fiber and routers for GPUs and this starts to look familiar.

almost nobody remember the router craze.

people don't even remember the era before the current brands. like the time a bell offshoot almost crashed canada because they siphoned all the telephone money into bad routers.

Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F

#175
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.

Its not clear to me that it needs to. If at the margins it can still provide an advantage in the market or national defense, then the spice must flow

I suspect it needs to if it is going to cover the costs of training.

Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F

#176
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.

According to Dario, each model line has generally been profitable: i.e. $200MM to train a model that makes $1B in profit over its lifetime. But, since each model has been more and more expensive to train, they keep needing to raise more money to train the next generation of model, and the company balance sheet looks negative: i.e. they spent more this year than last (since the training cost for model N+1 is higher), and the model this year made less money this year than they spent (even if the model generation itself was profitable, model N isn't profitable enough to train model N+1 without raising — and spending — more money).

That's still a pretty good deal for an investor: if I give you $15B, you will probably make a lot more than $15B with it. But it does raise questions about when it will simply become infeasible to train the subsequent model generation due to the costs going up so much (even if, in all likelihood, that model would eventually turn a profit).

Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F

#177
post #83

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…

In this imaginary timeline where initial investments keep increasing this way, how long before we see a leak shutter a company? Once the model is out, no one would pay for it, right?

There’s the opportunity cost here of those resources (and not talking only about the money) not being spent on power generating that actually benefits the individual consumer.

Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F

#180

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…

As humans don't actually work like LLMs do, we can surmise that there are far more efficient ways to get to AGI. We just need to find them.

Can you elaborate? The technology to build a human brain would cost billions in today’s dollars. Are you thinking moreso about energy efficiency?
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