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Anthropic raises $13B Series F

anthropic.com

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Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F

#521
post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it was worth it, you'd see some easy self hostable package, no? And by definition, its profitable to self host or these AI companies are in trouble.

You need a 100+gigs ram and a top of the line GPU to run legacy models at home. Maybe if you push it that setup will let you handle 2 people maybe 3 people. You think anyone is going to make money on that vs $20 a month to anthropic?

[deleted]

Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F

#522
post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it was worth it, you'd see some easy self hostable package, no? And by definition, its profitable to self host or these AI companies are in trouble.

You need a 100+gigs ram and a top of the line GPU to run legacy models at home. Maybe if you push it that setup will let you handle 2 people maybe 3 people. You think anyone is going to make money on that vs $20 a month to anthropic?

Can you explain to me where Anthropic (or it's investors) expect to be making money if that's what it actually costs to run this stuff?

Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F

#523

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),…

> 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.

Surely the Anthropic CEO will have no incentive to lie.

Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F

#524

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the Uber business plan - losing money until the competition loses more and goes out of business. So far Lyft seems to be doing okay, which proves the business plan doesn't really work.

Uber is profitable so why do you think it doesn't work?

Because the competition hasn't gone out of business (at least outside the US where tons of other ride hailing apps are available in most major locales) and because 16 (SIXTEEN!!!) years after founding Uber is still net profit negative: over its lifetime it has lost more money than it made.

The only people that really benefited from Uber are:

- Uber executives

- early investors that saw the share price go up

- early customers that got VC subsidized rides

Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F

#525

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the Uber business plan - losing money until the competition loses more and goes out of business. So far Lyft seems to be doing okay, which proves the business plan doesn't really work.

There are endless examples of that business model working...

Are there? Which ones? I'm especially interested in companies that weren't built to be sold.

Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F

#526
post #83

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…

In this imaginary timeline where initial investments keep increasing this way, how long before we see a leak shutter a company? Once the model is out, no one would pay for it, right?

gpt-oss-120b has cost OpenAI virtually all of my revenue, because I can pay Cerebras and Groq a fraction of what I was paying for o4-mini and get dramatically faster inference, for a model that passes my eval suite. This is to say, I think high-quality "open" models that are _good enough_ are a much bigger threat. Even more so since OpenRouter has essentially commoditized generation.

Each new commercial model needs to not just be better than the previous version, it needs to be significantly better than the SOTA open models for the bread-and-butter generation that I'm willing to pay the developer a premium to use their resources for generation.

Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F

#527

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

Well, if everyone is unemployed there won't be much of a market for these newly AI enabled companies to sell into. Also, in the extreme, you'd have deflation such that it's worth hiring again. This would be very painful.

More likely automatic stabilizers and additional stimulative spending would have to happen in order to fully utilize all the new productive capacity (or reduce it, as people start to work less). It's politically hard to sustain double digit unemployment, and ultimately the government can always spend enough or cut enough taxes to get everyone employed or get enough people to leave the labor force.

Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F

#529
post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

The difference is once you bought one of those chips you could do your own innovation on top of it (i.e., with software) without further interference from those well-funded companies. You can't do that with GPT et al. because of the subscription model.

Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F

#530

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

Does this really describe a "most" ør are you just describing capital?

The capitalization is getting insane. Were basically at the point where you ned more capital than a small nations GDP.

That sounds mich more accurate to my ears, and much more troubling

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