Wait did I see “ Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan” as an investor? Are they putting Canadian public funds into Anthropic?
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Anthropic raises $13B Series F
411–420 of 661 posts
Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F
#412This round started at $5bn target and it ends at $13bn. When this sort of thing happens it's normally because the company wants to 1) hit the "hot" market, and 2) has uncertainty about their ability to raise revenues at higher valuations in the future. Whatever it is, the signal it's sending of Anthropic insiders is negative for AI investors. Other comments having read a few hundred comments here: - there is so much…
Lol yeah I generally read most comments on here with one eye closed. This is one of the good ones though.
Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F
#413So 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.
Most investors I've heard talk about the AI bubble have mentioned exactly that they know it is a bubble. They are just playing the game, because there is money to be made before that bubble bursts. And additionally, there is real value in these companies.
I would assume the majority of investors in AI are playing a game of estimating how much more these AI valuations can run before crashing, and whether that crash will matter in the long-run if the growth of these companies lives up to their estimates.
Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F
#414Earlier quoted context omitted.
Proudly proclaiming on the Conversations With Tyler podcast that given a double or nothing bet with a 51% chance of success he'd keep playing forever.
Isn't that just the right thing to do, statistically? Vegas has been operating profitably this way for decades.
It's not the same due to the Law of Large Numbers. The risk involved in many small 51% bets is very different from the risk in a single all-or-nothing 51% bet.
Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F
#415Earlier quoted context omitted.
"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 destroye…
There's a subtle and nuanced difference between real wealth and financial wealth that most people never touch on.
Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F
#416Earlier quoted context omitted.
Eh, if this is true then IBM and Intel would still be the kings of the hill. Plenty of companies came from the bottom up out of nothing during the 90s and 2000s to build multi-billion dollar companies that are still dominate the market today. Many of those companies struggled for investment and grew over a long timeframe. The argument is something like that is not really possible anymore given the absurd upfront inve…
Anthropic has existed for a grand total of 4 years. But yes, there was a window of opportunity when it was possible to do cutting-edge work without billions of investment. That window of opportunity is now past, at least for LLMs. Many new technologies follow a similar pattern.
What about deepseek r1? That was earlier this year - how do you know that there won't be more "deepseek moments" in the coming years?
Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F
#417So 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…
Remind me what happened re. SoftBank + WeWork.
Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F
#418The 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…
> All the innovation is coming "top-down" from very well funded companies - many of them tech incumbents
The model leaders here are OpenAI and Anthropic, two new companies. In the programming space, the next leaders are Qwen and DeepSeek. The one incumbent is Google who trails all four for my workloads.
In the DevTools space, a new startup, Cursor, has muscled in on Microsoft's space.
This is all capital heavy, yes, because models are capital heavy to build. But the Innovator's Dilemma persists. Startups lead the way.
Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F
#419Earlier quoted context omitted.
> In the early days of FedEx, Smith had to go to great lengths to keep the company afloat. In one instance, after a crucial business loan was denied, he took the company's last $5,000 to Las Vegas and won $27,000 gambling on blackjack to cover the company's $24,000 fuel bill. Some who take on unreasonable risk will be among the most successful people alive. Most will lose eventually, long before you hear about them i…
What this version of the FedEx story doesn't mention is that Fred was already stiffing his pilots on their salaries. Taking the last money in the company and deciding that the best use for it was the blackjack table in Vegas and not paying his employees ... worked well, but it was a gamble, let's be clear, not a calculated decision - like you say, not the decision of a "great genius". It goes a different way, and you…
If your marginal utility of money increases with more, it's a rational decision to go to a casino and gamble.
Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F
#420So 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.
I see two of nineteen investors were also invested in FTX (Insight and Ontario teachers). With hindsight that's a bad investment although they probably recovered their money here so probably not their worst. Does this actually tell you they are stupid or insane?
I think that's one possible interpretation but another is that these funds choose to allocate a controlled portion of their capital toward high risk investments with the expectation that many will fail but some will pay off. It's far from clear that they are crazy or stupid.