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Anthropic raises $13B Series F

anthropic.com

361–370 of 661 posts

Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F

#361
post #120
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It feels a bit unreasonable to me. Anthropic is arguably comparable to Google's Gemini program. Is Gemini 10% of Alphabet's value? If so, how much of that is because of its ability to consume and interact with things like YouTube and Workspaces? I could see two or three percent, but this seems like a pretty big stretch. Then again, I'm not a VC.

To make a similar comparison, Alphabet's Waymo has AV's that actually work. But they're not capturing 80% of Tesla's valuation.

Don't those cost like $400,000 a piece to outfit, though? I mean this with tremendous respect because I think they're the only ones doing it "right," I feel like Waymo is kind of 'bruteforcing' autonomous driving using money. There's an inherent limit to the impact of a technology (and thus its long-term value) based on its cost, and even stipulating that Waymo has solved it in general, I think a valuation should be contingent on a roadmap which shows how it's going to scale out -- this seems like an as-yet unsolved problem until someone shows how to combine the reliability of the tech-heavy Waymo system with the price tag of a Tesla.

Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F

#362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody wants to make a commercial NSFW model that then suffers a jailbreak... for what is the most illegal NSFW content.

Why is this illegal btw? I mean whats stopping an AI company from releasing a proper NSFW model? I hope it doesn't happen but I want to know what prevents them from doing it now.

in some jurisdictions generating a swastika or a hammer and sickle is illegal.

that said, I'm sure you can imagine that the really illegal, truly, positively sickening and immoral stuff is children-adjacent and you can be 100% sure there are sociopaths doing training runs for the broken people who'll buy the weights.

Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F

#363
post #322
post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 un…

Maybe you don't want to share, but I'm scratching my head trying to think of something I would need to talk to Anthropic's customer service about that would be urgent and un-straightfoward enough to frustrate me to the point of using the term "abuse"..

Particularly since they seem to be complaining about service as a consumer, rather than an enterprise...

Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F

#364
post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is this illegal btw? I mean whats stopping an AI company from releasing a proper NSFW model? I hope it doesn't happen but I want to know what prevents them from doing it now.

in some jurisdictions generating a swastika or a hammer and sickle is illegal. that said, I'm sure you can imagine that the really illegal, truly, positively sickening and immoral stuff is children-adjacent and you can be 100% sure there are sociopaths doing training runs for the broken people who'll buy the weights.

Is it illegal to use mspaint to generate similar vile things?

Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F

#365
post #59

Wait did I see “ Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan” as an investor? Are they putting Canadian public funds into Anthropic?

To me, 'public pension monies' (more or less, retirement savings from citizens who happen to work for the government) and 'public funds' don't seem like the exact same thing. To me, public funds implies money from the government budget or sovereign wealth funds.

Although I admit that the government may be on the hook to replenish any spectacular failures in such a pension plan so in that way, it is somewhat fair -- though I doubt any one investment is weighted so heavily in any pension fund as to precipitate such an event.

Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F

#366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is very pessimistic take. Where else do you think the innovation would come from? Take cloud for example - where did the innovation come from? It was from the top. I have no idea how you came to the conclusion that this implies monetization is going to be awful. How do you know models are expensive to run? They have gone down in price repeatedly in the last 2 years. Why do you assume it has to run in the cloud w…

C-suite is pushing business adoption, and those GenAI projects of which 95% are failing.

That same report said a lot people are just using personal accounts for work though.

Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F

#367
post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think we underestimate the insane amount of idle cash the rich have. We know that the top 1% owns something like 80% of all resources, so they don't need that money. They can afford to burn a good chunk of global wealth so that they can have even more global wealth. Even at the current rates of insanity, the wealthy have spent a tiny fraction of their wealth on AI. Bezos could put up this $13 billion himself and re…

"This is a technology that could replace a sizable fraction of humamkind as a labor input." And if it does? What happens when a sizable fraction of humamkind is hungry and can't find work? It usually doesn't turn out so well for the rich.

I don't think most folks think very hard about where most wealth comes from but imagine it just sort of exists in a fixed quantity or is pulled from the ground like coal or diamonds - there's a fixed amount of it, and if there are very rich people, it must be because they took the coal/diamonds away from other people who need it. This leads to catchy slogans.

But it's pretty obvious wealth can be created and destroyed. The creation of wealth comes from trade, which generally comes from a vibrant middle class which not only earns a fair bit but also spends it. Wars and revolutions are effective at destroying wealth and (sometimes) equitably redistributing what's left.

Both the modern left and modern right seem to have arrived at a consensus that trade frictions are a good way to generate (or at least preserve) wealth, while the history of economics indicates quite the contrary. This was recently best pilloried by a comic that showed a town under siege and the besieging army commenting that this was likely to make the city residents wealthy by encouraging self-reliance.

We need abundant education and broad prosperity for stability - even (and maybe especially) for the ultra wealthy. Most things we enjoy require absolute and not relative wealth. Would you rather be the richest person in a poor country or the poorest of the upper class in a developed economy?

Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F

#368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

alphabet is "worth" 2.45 trillion on the public market, is anthropic worth a bit less than 10% of google going forward? I don't think that's entirely unreasonable...

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.

"Google’s advertising revenue in 2024 was about $264.6 billion"

Somebody above said that Anthropic might reach $9 billion ARR by the end of this year.

Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F

#369

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…

I saw a story posted on reddit that U.S. engineers went to China and said the U.S. would lose the A.I. game because THE ENERGY GRID was much worse than China's. That's just pure insanity to me. It's not even Internet speed or hardware. It's literally not having enough electricity. What is going on with the world...

Not to mention water for cooling. Large data centers can use 1 million+ gallons per day.

Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F

#370

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.

Why is this downvoted when it's spot on.. if reality < expectations so much money is sitting on extremely quickly depreciating assets. It will be bad. Risk is to the downside.
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