The only people this matters to is the initial investors in earlier series or seed fund stages.
Anthropic raises $13B Series F
281–290 of 661 posts
Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F
#282And 75% of that just gets shipped right over to nVidia as pure profit. The mind boggles at the macro-economic inefficiency of that situation.
Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F
#283The 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…
It's the SV playbook: invent a field, make it indispensable, monopolise it and profit.
It still amazes me that Uber, a taxi company, is worth however many billions.
I guess for the bet to work out, it kinda needs to end in AGI for the costs to be worth it. LLMs are amazing but I'm not sure they justify the astronomical training capex, other than as a stepping stone.
Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F
#284Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Things working out in the end doesn't make what he did not a crime at the time Morally speaking, no. Practically speaking, it does. He would not have seen jail time.
>Morally speaking, no. Practically speaking, it does. He would not have seen jail time. It's literally exactly what Shkreli got 7 years for, even after repaying investors. If you defraud money from someone and put it back before they find out, it's still a crime. Fraud is about intent more than anything else, and they proved it for SBF.
Right, but that’s because Shkreli openly admitted to it on the internet
Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F
#285Remember the YouTube acquisition? Many probably don’t since it was 2006. $1.65B. To many, it seemed bonkers. Narrow point: In general, one person’s impression of what is crazy does not fare well against market-generated information. Broader point: If you think you know more than the market, all other things equal, you’re probably wrong. Lesson: Only searching for reasons why you are right is a fishing expedition. If…
Somebody didn’t get the memo from MIT…
Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F
#286Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Now explain why government raise the debt limit? other than allowing printing to get fiat money?
Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F
#287Earlier quoted context omitted.
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),…
I mean, this is how semiconductors have worked forever. Every new generation of fab costs ~2x what the previous generation did, and you need to build a new fab ever couple of years. But (if you could keep the order book full for the fab) it would make a lot of money over its lifetime, and you still needed to borrow/raise even more to build the next generation of fab. And if you were wrong about demand .... you got into a really big bust, which is also characteristic of the semiconductor industry.
This was the power of Moore's Law, it gave the semiconductor engineers an argument they could use to convince the money-guys to let them raise the capital to build the next fab- see, it's right here in this chart, it says that if we don't do it our competitors will, because this chart shows that it is inevitable. Moore's Law had more of a financial impact than a technological one.
And now we're down to a point where only TSMC is for sure going through with the next fab (as a rough estimate of cost, think 40 billion dollars)- Samsung and Intel are both hemming and hawing and trying to get others to go in with them, because that is an awful lot of money to get the next frontier node. Is Apple (and Nvidia, AMZ, Google, etc.) willing to pay the costs (in delivery delays, higher costs, etc.) to continue to have a second potential supplier around or just bite the bullet and commit to TSMC being the only company that can build a frontier node?
And even if they can make it to the next node (1.4nm/14A), can they get to the one after that?
The implication for AI models is that they can end up like Intel (or AMD, selling off their fab) if they misstep badly enough on one or two nodes in a row. This was the real threat of Deepseek: if they could get frontier models for an order of magnitude cheaper, then the entire economics of this doesn't work. If they can't keep up, then the economics of it might, so long as people are willing to pay more for the value produced by the new models.
Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F
#288I 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
Maybe this is a roundabout weird benefit to income inequality... Like the banks and private equity have so much cash burning that they start taking increasingly risky moonshots that result in actual innovative projects. Normally projects like this would require the government to spearhead, but now there is so much cash floating around they can just throw 13B at a totally unprofitable high risk company.
Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F
#289Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
The amount of money banks create is determined by the appetite for credit which is determined by the interest rate. The fed has not been actively destroying money, they are at most slowing the rate of the increase of money.
Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F
#290Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Now explain why government raise the debt limit? other than allowing printing to get fiat money?
Ah yeah, that's a common misconception.
Deficit spending doesn't create new money. Deficit spending borrows existing money from the population and institutions in exchange for a promise of future government revenues. The Fed does not participate in treasury primary auctions and does not monetize the debt as a means of funding government operations.
If you printed new money to pay for the government, you wouldn't have a debt. That's double-counting. Not to mention the debt is twice as large as the entire money supply so what you're suggesting isn't even physically possible. It would be inflationary to simply print new money to finance spending, which is exactly why it's not done.
[edit] Also the debt limit is a stupid concept that's likely unconstitutional. Congress authorizes spending, meaningful debate over paying for it by adjusting the debt limit likely falls afoul of the 14th amendment's public debt clause. But yeah I mean the debt limit goes up because the government spends more money than it takes in, so it needs to borrow more each year.