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Anthropic raises $13B Series F

anthropic.com

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Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F

#401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Economics is entirely made up. It's a social science.

In case of economics, the gap between "social science" and "entirely made up" is ten miles long and filled with hellfire. The laws of economics have the kind of inevitability you expect from the laws of physics. Disrespect them at your own peril.

Hard disagree on this. The gap between the levels of statistical significance you get in economics vs physics is massive. They're not at the same levels of inevitability. The predictive power of the laws of physics vs the laws of economics is vastly different.

Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F

#402

One of my rules of thumb: When money is growing on trees, pick it . That applies to individuals, but it probably also applies to companies. We're in an AI boom? Raise some money while it's easy.

IIRC Matt Levine says: when there is a tech bubble, the correct trade is not to short the nasdaq, it's to start a company and ask Masayoshi Son for an investment

Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F

#403

So many negative comments here! The fact that one of the top players in a new market segment with significant growth potential can raise $13B at a 20x revenue valuation is not the bubble indicator you think it is. It's at least possible that the investment pays off. These investors almost certainly aren't insane or stupid. We may still be in a bubble, but before you declare money doesn't mean anything any more and st…

These are the same investors who got scammed by SBF who didn't even have a basic spreadsheet that explained the finances.

... or really any SoftBank Vision Fund backed startup

Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F

#404
post #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 -- t…

Government workers are funded by public money, so public pension monies are funded by public money ultimately.

Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F

#405
post #2

These numbers seem made up at times / difficult to comprehend what they expect is happening ...

This is the fastest-growing company by revenue, jumping from $1B to $3B in just five months. Hitting $10B is only a matter of time, which would put its valuation at a reasonable ~18x sales multiple. It doesn't even matter where we are in the AI hype cycle - AI adoption will keep increasing, it's not even a question at this point. From a technical perspective, they manage to attract top talent - Google / OpenAI lose a…

> they manage to attract top talent

I do think this is important. Many of the best researchers are also religious AGIists and Anthropic is the most welcoming to them. This is a field where the competence of researchers really matters.

Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F

#407

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…

> “There's kind of like two different ways you could describe what's happening in the model business right now. So, let's say in 2023, you train a model that costs 100 million dollars. > > And then you deploy it in 2024, and it makes $200 million of revenue. Meanwhile, because of the scaling laws, in 2024, you also train a model that costs a billion dollars. And then in 2025, you get $2 billion of revenue from that $1 billion, and you spend $10 billion to train the model. > > So, if you look in a conventional way at the profit and loss of the company, you've lost $100 million the first year, you've lost $800 million the second year, and you've lost $8 billion in the third year. So, it looks like it's getting worse and worse. If you consider each model to be a company, the model that was trained in 2023 was profitable.” > ... > > “So, if every model was a company, the model is actually, in this example, is actually profitable. What's going on is that at the same time as you're reaping the benefits from one company, you're founding another company that's like much more expensive and requires much more upfront R&D investment. And so, the way that it's going to shake out is this will keep going up until the numbers go very large, the models can't get larger, and then it will be a large, very profitable business, or at some point, the models will stop getting better. > > The march to AGI will be halted for some reason, and then perhaps it will be some overhang, so there will be a one-time, oh man, we spent a lot of money and we didn't get anything for it, and then the business returns to whatever scale it was at.” > ... > > “The only relevant questions are, at how large a scale do we reach equilibrium, and is there ever an overshoot?”

From Dario’s interview on Cheeky Pint: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/cheeky-pint/id18210553...

Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F

#408

HN in 2046 > Headline: OpenAI raises 400 Trillion, proclaims dominion over the delta quadrant > Top comment: This just proves that it's a bubble. No AI company has been profitable, we're in the era of diminishing returns. I don't know one real use case for AI It's hilarious how routinely bearish this site is about AI. I guess it makes sense given how much AI devalues siloed tech expertise.

comment history appears to be an AI shill account.

Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F

#409

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 ben…

> The whole LLM era is horrible. All the innovation is coming "top-down" from very well funded companies

Wouldn't it be the same for the hardware companies? Not everyone could build CPUs as Intel/Motorola/IBM did, not everyone could build mainframes like IBM did, and not everyone could build smart phones like Apple or Samsung did. I'd assume it boils down the value of the LLMs instead of who has the moat. Of course, personally I really wish everyone can participate in the innovation like the internet era, like training and serving large models on a laptop. I guess that day will come, like PC over mainframes, but just not now.

Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F

#410

So many negative comments here! The fact that one of the top players in a new market segment with significant growth potential can raise $13B at a 20x revenue valuation is not the bubble indicator you think it is. It's at least possible that the investment pays off. These investors almost certainly aren't insane or stupid. We may still be in a bubble, but before you declare money doesn't mean anything any more and st…

> These investors almost certainly aren't insane or stupid. I'm sure this exact sentence was said before every bubble burst.

That sounds very cynical and knowing which is obviously great, but not super interesting. Do you think the investors are insane or stupid? Do you think this is a bubble and that it's about to burst? I'm interested to know why.
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