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Anthropic raises $13B Series F

anthropic.com

511–520 of 661 posts

Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F

#511

Earlier quoted context omitted.

C-suite is pushing business adoption, and those GenAI projects of which 95% are failing.

The other side of it is lots of users are willingly purchasing the subscription without any need of push.

And yet we fail to see an uptick of better and higher quality software, if anything, AI slop is making OSS owners reject AI prs because of their low quality.

I'd wager the personal failure rate when using LLMs is probably even higher than the 95% in enterprise, but will wait to see the numbers.

Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F

#513

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…

Margins of 60%? On inference maybe but that disappears when you price in model training.

This guy's analysis says they are bleeding out despite massive revenue

https://www.wheresyoured.at/anthropic-is-bleeding-out/

Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F

#514

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…

Most of that power usage is moving data and weights into multiply accumulate hardware, then moving the data out. The actual computation is a fairly small fraction of the power consumed.

It's quite likely that an order of magnitude improvement can be had. This is an enormous incentive signal for someone to follow.

Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F

#515

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

your crystal ball needs calibration. this round alone was 14pct (183/13)... so the dillution was likely over 20pct.

13/183=0.071 so how can it be 20pct for this round??

Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F

#516
The greatest failure of American capitalism today is that meteoric companies take decades to trade on public markets instead of years. Only the already wealthy and connected are allowed to invest in these kinds of opportunities. In the 80s and 90s Anthropic would have been trading on NYSE already. Zoomers have it rough ...

Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F

#517
post #205
post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>You can have all the talent in the world but if you can't get 100k H100s and a dedicated power plant, you're out. I really have to wonder, how long will it be before the competition moves into who has the most wafer-scale engines. I mean, surely the GPU is a more inefficient packaging form factor than large dies with on-board HBM, with a massive single block cooler?

Sentiment I have heard is manufactories do not want to increase die size because defects per die increases at the same time.

This is why chiplets are used.

Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F

#518
post #513

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…

Margins of 60%? On inference maybe but that disappears when you price in model training. This guy's analysis says they are bleeding out despite massive revenue https://www.wheresyoured.at/anthropic-is-bleeding-out/

In Jan, when deepseek launched, Dario Amodei had to disclose they spent about $10M to train the last generation of models (his arguments was deepseek was on the curve, not breaking it).

They earned $250M in May based on ARR, and about $400M in july. Model training is going to be amortized over multiple years anyway. I am not privy to how much they spent, not going to comment on that. GM was public news, and hence I got that.

Re Zitron's analysis, I don't find them to be reliable or compelling.

Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F

#519

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),…

Do they have a function to predict in advance if the next model is going to be profitable?

If not, this seems like a recipe for bankruptcy. You are always investing more than you're making, right up until the day you don't make it back. Whether that's next year or in ten or twenty years. It's basically impossible to do it forever - there simply isn't enough profit to be had in the world if you go forward enough orders of magnitude. How will they know when to hop off the train?

Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F

#520

Earlier 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.

Big question is whether it replaces and then doesn't create new opportunity to make up for those casualties. I'm not sold on this, but there's this part of me that actually believes LLM's or perhaps AI more broadly will enable vast numbers of people to do things that were formerly impossible for them to do because the cost was too great, or the thought of doing it too complex. Now those same things are not only acces…

I'm genuinely curious about how you and other people with similar outlook see this playing out, as it would kind of provide hope.

Scenario: You are a medium level engineer, who got laid off from a company betting on AI to replace a significant portion of their junior/medium level developers. You were also employing a middle-aged woman, to help with the kids after school and around the house, until you and your wife come back from work. She now needed to be let go as well, as you can't afford her anymore. The same thing happened to a large portion of your peers and work in the same industry/profession is practically no longer available. This has ripple effects on your local market (restaurants, caffes, clothing stores etc).

How do you see this as empowering and a net positive thing for these people individually, and for the society? What do they do that replaces their previous income and empowers them to get back to the same level at least?

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