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Anthropic raises $13B Series F

anthropic.com

481–490 of 661 posts

Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F

#481

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. So they indirectly owned some Anthropic through the FTX bankruptcy. I kinda wonder whether they somehow opted to keep their Anthropic stake when the FTX estate sold. Or maybe they bought it at some other time.

was FTX actually liquidated? Last I read the lawyers were just busy paying themselves $500,000 a day

Yes. Among other things, the Anthropic stake was sold, and repayments have begun. The full process will probably drag out through next year at least.

On the lawyer fees...do you expect someone to do it for free? Would you rather hire someone without the expertise? Do you think the crimes are the estate lawyers' fault?

Process costs money. You can sneer at the professionals that work hard to keep a lawful society in order, if you like. SBF sure did. Look where that got him.

Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F

#482
post #321
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…

$183B makes sense because 20 years ago something else was valued at $1.65 billion and money has decreased in value 100-fold?

You seem to think that one selected analogy proves that there’s no other explanation by which something is sensible?

Example: I could also make up dozens of reasons why something permitted by the laws of physics seems ridiculous.

Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F

#483

Is it worth it if I have an AI related idea to try and get it built ? It'll take a solid year and about 30k. Any chance of even talking to a VC as an outsider?

If it only takes 30k can't you bootstrap and built it yourself? Or even just work on it on the side alongside your day job.

I'm going to need more than 30k to achieve a profit.

I'm basically hiring a part time front end junior assistant to fill in some gaps.

I'm hiring out of a cheaper county where 30k can actually do something. The idea is the first 30 gets an MVP done.

I don't think I could finish anything worth selling for that.

Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F

#484
post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here are some ways that it’s not very far from a market mechanism: 1. How much an organization is willing to invest in X competes against other market opportunities. 2. The effective price per share (as part of the latest round of financing) is an implicit negotiation. It is a matter of degree, sure, but my point still stands: there is a lot of collective information going into this valuation. So an individual should…

> there is a lot of collective information going into this valuation No, there isn't. For example, I would like to legally bet against Anthropic existing as a going concern in five years. Where can I do this? All the information against them is discarded and hidden.

You misunderstand what I mean by “collective”. If you are charitable, the meaning is easy to see. “Collective” as I used it does not mean that everything or every person gets factored in.

Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F

#485
post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here are some ways that it’s not very far from a market mechanism: 1. How much an organization is willing to invest in X competes against other market opportunities. 2. The effective price per share (as part of the latest round of financing) is an implicit negotiation. It is a matter of degree, sure, but my point still stands: there is a lot of collective information going into this valuation. So an individual should…

> there is a lot of collective information going into this valuation No, there isn't. For example, I would like to legally bet against Anthropic existing as a going concern in five years. Where can I do this? All the information against them is discarded and hidden.

Rather than getting sidetracked, I will repeat the central point and question to you again:

> How many people have more information than even an imperfect market-derived quantity?

I’ll restate the point because I don’t think you’re understanding what I mean.

Do you think this funding round was irrational from the point of view of the investors? If so, how can you make such a claim? Do you have information they do not?

It is possible you have some bit of knowledge they don’t, but on balance it is unlikely that you are operating from a position of having more relevant information.

Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F

#486
post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Sure Amazon was a big established co at the dawn of the cloud, and a little bit of an unexpected dark horse. None of the managed hosting providers saw Amazon coming. Also ran's like Rackspace and the like where also pretty established by that point.

But there was also cool stuff happening at smaller places like Joyent, Heroku, Slicehost, Linode, Backblaze, iron.io, etc.

Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F

#488
post #423
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…

I mean, this sounds like survivor bias in action? Google also bought Motorola for 12 billion and Microsoft bought Nokia for 7 billion. Those weren't success cases. Or more similarly, WeWork got 12B from investor and isn't doing well (hell, bankrupt, according to Wikipedia).

I see what you are getting at, but it is important to understand the context for my example and the argument I’m making.

I’ve explained various points at length in other comments: (i) why I selected this example (simply to show that folk wisdom or common sense is less reliable than market-driven valuations) (ii) how a funding round is influenced by markets even though it isn’t directly driven by a classic full market mechanism.

Something I haven’t said yet would be a question: how can an outsider rigorously assess the error in a funding round or acquisition? To phrase the question a different way: what price or valuation would an oracle assign based on known information?

One might call this ex-ante rationality. Framing it this way helps remove hindsight bias; for example, a subsequent failure doesn’t necessarily mean it was mispriced (sp?) at the time.

Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F

#489
post #72

Substitute fiber and routers for GPUs and this starts to look familiar.

almost nobody remember the router craze. people don't even remember the era before the current brands. like the time a bell offshoot almost crashed canada because they siphoned all the telephone money into bad routers.

For those curious, I found this to be a very entertaining retelling of events from Nortel's persepective: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I6xwMIUPHss

Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F

#490
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…

Lol yeah I generally read most comments on here with one eye closed. This is one of the good ones though.

It helps me to know that there are other people noticing this. Like Fox News, a lot of comments here probably make us dumber.
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