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Anthropic raises $13B Series F

anthropic.com

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Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F

#271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No that's what low interest rates does

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

Maybe, but interest rates among other bad banking practices is how we got here in the first place.

Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F

#272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

RIP our 401ks that will end up being the bagholders when its dumped on the market.

Your 401k is going to be fine, nobody goes public anymore until they're a big, dumb, boring, profitable company and all of the risk+returns have been rung out. Too many normies betting their life savings without understanding this risk in prior bubbles, so we regulated away the ability for non-institutional investors to take venture risk at all.

> we regulated away the ability for non-institutional investors to take venture risk at all.

Some institutions try to achieve this by launching their own cryptocurrencies, but by and large, the market isn't biting.

Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F

#273
post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Remember the YouTube acquisition? To many, it seemed bonkers. Because of the legal uncertainty about what they were doing. There was no fundamental technological impediment. Here the technology simply doesn't exist and this is a giant bet that it can be magically created by throwing (a lot) more money at the existing idea. This is why it's "dumb money" because they don't seem to understand the dynamics of what they…

Update: I edited my comment to focus on the mindset of making predictions (including recognizing the uncertainty and being comprehensive about possible scenarios) I made a new top-level comment mentioning the 2006 YouTube acquisition only to show that many people were shocked, but -surprise- markets are usually better predictors than individual hunches.

This isn't a market in that sense though - it's very much one sided what Anthropic tells us and they are privately traded.

It is very far from a situation where the price discovery mechanism is allowed to work.

Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F

#275

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…

And how much will one query cost you once the companies start to try and make this stuff profitable?

Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F

#276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is being played like a winner-takes-it-all right now (it may or may not be such a market). So it is a game of being the one that is left standing, once the others fall off. In this kind of game, speeding more is done as a strategy to increase the chances of other competitors running out of cash or otherwise hitting a wall. Sustainability is the opposite of the goal being pursued... Whether one reaches "AGI" is not…

It's the Uber business plan - losing money until the competition loses more and goes out of business. So far Lyft seems to be doing okay, which proves the business plan doesn't really work.

Uber market cap makes places it in the top100 in the world, whereas Lyft is around 1/25th of Uber in market cap, and not even top1000. I would consider that a success... That is basically as much winner-takes-it-all one can realistically get in a global market. Cases where the top is just 5x the runner up would still be very winner oriented.

Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F

#277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who's "they"?

Governments, CBs and investment banks. "They" do it and work together to print more.

In a centrally banked economy, retail and commercial banks create money when you take out loans. The government doesn't create money except during QE which only happened twice in the US, 2009-2014 and 2020-2021. That's why I was curious what you meant by "they." The Fed has been actively destroying money for the last 4 years.

Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F

#278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Always makes you wonder how many companies that are successes today could’ve had their SBF moment, but market conditions kept them afloat

I think it's really objectionable to refer to this as an "SBF moment". It's not just about surviving a downtown and unforseen circumstances with some luck (like the sibling talking about FedEx barely making it). Tesla, for example, was famously extremely close to bankruptcy. But SBF got into the situation he was in due to his egregious fraud . The accounting at FTX was a criminal joke, with multiple sets of books, by…

But that’s precisely what I mean. How many companies had similarly sketchy situations, cleaned up their act and nobody ever noticed?

That number isn’t 0

Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F

#279

There's a big issue with a lot of thinking about these valuations, which is that LLM inference does not need the 5-nines of uptime guarantees that cloud datacenters provide. You are going to see small business investors around the world pursue the following model: - Buy an old warehouse and a bunch of GPUs - Hire your local tech dude to set up the machines and install some open-source LLMs - Connect your machines to…

I use OpenAI's batch mode for about 80% of my AI work at the moment, and one of the upsides is it reduces the frantic side of my AI work. When the response is immediate I feel like I can't catch a break.

I think once the sheen of Microsoft Copilot and the like wear off and people realise LLMs are really good at creating deterministic tools but not very good at being one, not only will the volume of LLM usage decline, but the urgency will too.

Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F

#280

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…

Could they vastly reduce this cost by specializing models? Like is a general know everything model exponentially more expensive than one that deeply understands a single topic (like programming, construction, astrophysics, whatever)?

Is there room for a smaller team to beat Anthropic/OpenAI/etc. at a single subject matter?

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