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Anthropic raises $13B Series F

anthropic.com

461–470 of 661 posts

Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F

#461

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…

> can raise $13B at a 20x revenue valuation is not the bubble indicator you think it is.

What a minute. Isn't this the very definition of a bubble?

Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F

#462
post #377

This 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…

I may agree if it was a 20% dilution round, but not if they are increasing from 3% to 7% dilution. Being so massively oversubscribed is a bullish sign, bad companies would be struggling to fill out their round.

Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F

#463
post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As humans don't actually work like LLMs do, we can surmise that there are far more efficient ways to get to AGI. We just need to find them.

Can you elaborate? The technology to build a human brain would cost billions in today’s dollars. Are you thinking moreso about energy efficiency?

> The technology to build a human brain would cost billions in today’s dollars

I'm reminded of how insanely complex the human brain is: ~100 trillion connections. The Nvidia H100 has just 0.08 trillion transistors.

Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F

#464

Their projections for ARR at the end of this year at a high of $9B[1] at the end of this year. And reported gross margins of 60% (-30% with cloud providers partnerships). All things considered, if this pans out, it's a 20x multiple. High yes, but not that crazy. Specially considering their growth rate and that too at a decent margin at gm level. [1]: It was $3B at the end of May (so likely $250M in May alone), and $5…

[deleted]

Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F

#465
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…

> Only searching for reasons why you are right is a fishing expedition.

Not to be mean, but aren't you being a little hypercritical here, bringing up your bespoke example of YouTube?

Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F

#466

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

1 million gallons is approximately 0.5 seconds of flow of the Columbia river.

Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F

#467

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 compute moat is getting absolutely insane.

Is it?

Seems like theres a tiny performance gain between "This runs fine on my laptop" and "This required a 10B dollar data centre"

I dont see any moat, just crazy investment hoping to crack the next thing and moat that.

Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F

#468

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.

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),…

That can only be true if someone else is subsidizing Anthropic's compute. The calculation is simple: Annualized depreciation costs on the AI buildout (hundreds of billions, possibly a trillion invested) are more that the combined total annualized revenue of the inference industry. A more realistic computation of expenses would show the each model line very deeply in the red.

Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F

#469
post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The casino is an extremely rational savings model if you expected to constantly be robbed and want to convert small (and thus not worth robbing) income streams into occasionally large sums of money to be spent rapidly. I.e. say you are a north korean worker in China/Russia and you occasionally get small change to spend on cigarettes, you could gamble it every 'paycheck' and eventually buy a phone to escape with the winnings.

Filipinos have a more predictable low-loss version of this call Paluwagan.

Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F

#470

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.

I'm not sure quantum computing is the solution, but it strikes me that a completely new compute paradigm like quantum computing is probably what is necessary - which is orders of magnitude more efficient and powerful than today's binary compute.
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