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Anthropic raises $13B Series F

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Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F

#301
post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Here are some ways that it’s not very far from a market mechanism:

1. How much an organization is willing to invest in X competes against other market opportunities.

2. The effective price per share (as part of the latest round of financing) is an implicit negotiation.

It is a matter of degree, sure, but my point still stands: there is a lot of collective information going into this valuation. So an individual should be intellectually humble relative to that. How many people have more information than even an imperfect market-derived quantity?

Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F

#302
post #222

Remember 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…

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Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F

#303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Assuming the best case: we're going to need to turn this productivity into houses or lifestyle improvement, soon... or I'm just going out with Sasquatch

While decoding your comment I'm going to assume Sasquatch to be a semi-underground (no web site, only calls) un-startup that specializes in survival kits for people leaving civilization behind. Like calling the vacuum repair store but more hippie themed.

That'll do :) edit: I assure you, there will still be a van

Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F

#304
post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if I give you $15B, you will probably make a lot more than $15B with it "probably" is the key word here, this feels like a ponzi scheme to me. What happens when the next model isn't a big enough jump over the last one to repay the investment? It seems like this already happened with GPT-5. They've hit a wall, so how can they be confident enough to invest ever more money into this?

I think you're really bending over backwards to make this company seem non viable. If model training has truly turned out to be profitable at the end of each cycle, then this company is going to make money hand over fist, and investing money to out compete the competition is the right thing to do. Most mega corps started out wildly unprofitable due to investing into the core business... until they aren't. It's almost…

>I think you're really bending over backwards to make this company seem non viable.

Having experienced Anthropic as a customer, I have a hard time thinking that their inevitable failure (something i'd bet on) will be model/capability-based, that's how bad they suck at every other customer-facing metric.

You think Amazon is frustrating to deal with? Get into a CSR-chat-loop with an uncaring LLM followed up on by an uncaring CSR.

My minimum response time with their customer service is 14 days -- 2 weeks -- while paying 200usd a month.

An LLM could be 'The Great Kreskin' and I would still try to avoid paying for that level of abuse.

Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F

#306

Throwing money and compute at AI strikes me as a very short-term solution. In the end, the human brain does not run off a nuclear power plant, not even when we are learning. I expect the next breakthroughs to be all about efficiency. Granted, that could be tomorrow, or in 5 years, and the AI companies have to stay all at in the meantime.

the human brain can't run off a nuclear power plant b/c it was too hard for evolution to figure out, but we figured it out. No reason running on nuclear power plant won't give much higher intelligence.

Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F

#307
post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps there are salient differences between art on a wall and a company.

At heart, not really. The whole point of all of this is to motivate humans to get off their butt and reduce entropy.

A painting on a wall is merely an inanimate object.

A company has agency; it seeks to add economic value to itself over time including changing people’s perceptions.

I don’t see how your comments have any bearing to the point I was making. What am I missing?

Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F

#308
post #151

Earlier 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.

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

I was expecting a wedding or birth announcement from that picture framing and title.

"We would like to introduce you to the spawn of Johnny Ive and Sam Altman, we're naming him Damien Thorn."

Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F

#309

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…

The whole LLM era is horrible. All the innovation is coming "top-down" from very well funded companies - many of them tech incumbents, so you know the monetization is going to be awful. Since the models are expensive to run it's all subscription priced and has to run in the cloud where the user has no control. The hype is insane, and so usage is being pushed by C-suite folks who have no idea whether it's actually benefiting someone "on the ground" and decisions around which AI to use are often being made on the basis of existing vendor relationships. Basically it's the culmination of all the worst tech trends of the last 10 years.

Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F

#310

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…

The biggest problem is that result doesn't worth spent resources
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