>Along with ICONIQ, the round was co-led by Fidelity Management & Research Company and Lightspeed Venture Partners.
Iconiq (Mark Zuckerberg's family office) was one of the lead investors in the round
Anthropic raises $13B Series F
471–480 of 661 posts
Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F
#472Earlier 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…
> I have no idea how you came to the conclusion that this implies monetization is going to be awful. Because cloud monetization was awful. It's either endless subscription pricing or ads (or both). Cloud is a terrible counter-example because it started many awful trends that strip consumer rights. For example "forever" plans that get yoinked when the vendor decides they don't like their old business model and want to…
lots of start ups were built on aws
i’d rather have a subscription than no service at all
oh, and one can always just not buy something if it’s not valuable enough
Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F
#473Did anyone else get offers to join single-purpose ventures (SPVs) to invest in this Anthropic round? I got the impression that some people were reselling access and adding layers of fees to profit from the hype.
Yes... tons
Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F
#474The 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…
That’s like being upset that you can’t dig your own suez canal.
So long as there is competition it’ll be available at marginal cost. And there is plenty of innovation that can be done on the edges, and not all of machine learning is LLMs.
Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F
#475So 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.
Why WeWork and not Alibaba?
Answer: It's easy to pick and choose to prove one's point.
Softbank has been doing well lately by the way:
https://www.ebc.com/forex/softbank-stock-price-jumps-13-afte...
Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F
#476The 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…
My hope is that this hype cycle overbuilds nuclear power capacity so much that we end up using it to sequester carbon dioxide from the atmosphere once the bubble pops and electricity prices become negative for most of the day.
In the medium term China has so much spare capacity that they maybe be the only game in town for highend models, while the US will be trying to fix a grid with 50 years of deferred maintenance.
Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F
#477Earlier quoted context omitted.
In a previous generation, the enabler of all our computer tech innovation was the incredible pace of compute growth due to Moore's Law, which was also "top-down" from very well-funded companies since designing and building cutting edge chips was (and still is) very, very expensive. The hype was insane, and decisions about what chip features to build were made largely on the basis of existing vendor relationships. Tho…
Should probably change this to "was appearance of incredible pace of compute growth due to Moore's Law," because even my basic CS classes from 15 years ago were teaching that it was drastically slowing down, and isn't really a "law" more than an observational trend that lasted a few decades. There are limits to how small you can make transistors and we're not too far from it, at least not what would continue to yield…
The corollary to Moores law, that computers get twice as fast every 18 months, died by 2010. People who didn't live through the 80s, 90s and early 00s, where you'd get a computer ten times as fast every 5 years, can't imagine what it was like back then.
Today the only way to scale compute is to throw more power at it or settle for the 5% per year real single core performance improvement.
Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F
#478Earlier 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…
> Take cloud for example - where did the innovation come from? It was from the top. Definitely not. That came years later but in the late 2000s to mid-2010s it was often engineers pushing for cloud services over the executives’ preferred in-house services because it turned a bunch of helpdesk tickets and weeks to months of delays into an AWS API call. Pretty soon CTOs were backing it because those teams shipped faste…
I'm pretty sure OP wasn't talking about the management hierarchy, but "from the top" in the sense that it was big established companies inventing the cloud and innovating and pushing in the space, not small startups.
Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F
#479Remember 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?
I don’t interpret the above as mean-spirited comment, but it does miss the point of the example I gave; namely, people second-guessing a market (or information heavily influenced by markets, like a new funding round) tend to lose. (Of course there are examples in the other direction, but they are less common and do not deserve equal emphasis.)
In general, a market synthesizes more information than any one individual, and when they operate well it is unlikely for an individual is going to beat them.
This is a well known general pattern, so if someone wants to argue in the other direction, they need to be ready to offer very strong evidence and reasoning why the market is wrong — and even when they do, they’re still probably going to be wrong.
Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F
#480Remember 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?
I think you mean hypocritical.
To answer: no, and even if it was a “yes” it wouldn’t affect the argument I was making. I’ll explain.
I was wondering how long it would take for this kind of meta-critique would pop up. Meta critiques are interesting: some people use them as zingers, hoping to dismantle someone else’s entire position. But they almost never accomplish that because they are at a different level of argument: they aren’t engaging with the argument itself.
Meta-critiques are more like an argument against the person crafting the argument. In this sense, they function not unlike ad hominem attacks while sneakily remaining fair game.
Lastly, even if I was a hypocrite, it wouldn’t necessarily mean that I was wrong — it would simply make me inconsistent in the application of a principle.