Anthropic raises $13B Series F • Hacker News Board

Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F

#541

Post by 3uler » Wed, Sep 03, 2025, 5:41 AM UTC

slashdave wrote: post #461

fancyfredbot wrote: post #386

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?

20x earnings is not that insane for a fast growing startup. Now Tesla and Palantir at 100x earnings is insane.

Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F

#542

Post by up2isomorphism » Wed, Sep 03, 2025, 5:41 AM UTC

llamasushi wrote: post #22

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…

There is no generational differences between these models. I tested cursors with all different backends and they are similar in most cases. So called race is just a Wall Street sensation to bump the stock price.

Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F

#543

Post by arduanika » Wed, Sep 03, 2025, 5:43 AM UTC

xyst wrote: post #281

The only people this matters to is the initial investors in earlier series or seed fund stages.

Ha.

Do you own any Amazon, Alphabet, or Salesforce, perhaps through some index fund? Congratulations, you own some Anthropic. This matters to you.

And market conditions matter to you, too. Every deal is a comparable mark that factors into every other deal. Where this tech is going, and whether we're in a bubble or just getting started... these are forces that are interested in you, even if you're not interested in them.

Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F

#544

Post by arduanika » Wed, Sep 03, 2025, 5:44 AM UTC

oytis wrote: post #238

Series what?

There's a logical limit to this "private markets are the new public markets" crap. Once they finish Series Z, they have to IPO. It's the law.

Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F

#545

Post by 3uler » Wed, Sep 03, 2025, 5:48 AM UTC

monax wrote: post #352

3uler wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

If you get a 10x speedup with an LLM it mean you are not doing anything new or interesting

That is 99% of software engineering, boring line of business CRUD applications or data pipelines.

Most creativity is just doing some slightly different riff on something done before…

Sorry to break it to you but most of your job is just context engineering for yourself.

Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F

#546

Post by joshcsimmons » Wed, Sep 03, 2025, 5:58 AM UTC

What is the business model? Has anyone answered that yet? Because selling $20 subscriptions ain't it.

Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F

#547

Post by thoughtpeddler » Wed, Sep 03, 2025, 6:10 AM UTC

d_burfoot wrote: post #220

There's a big issue with a lot of thinking about these valuations, which is that LLM inference does not need the 5-nines of uptime guarantees that cloud datacenters provide. You are going to see small business investors around the world pursue the following model: - Buy an old warehouse and a bunch of GPUs - Hire your local tech dude to set up the machines and install some open-source LLMs - Connect your machines to…

Isn't this the whole premise of existing companies like SF Compute? [0]

[0] https://sfcompute.com/

Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F

#548

Post by klausa » Wed, Sep 03, 2025, 6:10 AM UTC

rsanek wrote: post #159

code4tee wrote: post #65

Impressive round but it seems unlikely this game can go on much longer before something implodes. Given the amount of cash you need to set of fire to stay relevant it’s becoming nearly impossible for all but a few players to stay competitive, but those players have yet to demonstrate a viable business model. With all these models converging, the big players aren’t demonstrating a real technical innovation moat. Every…

I was convinced of this line of thinking for a while too but lately I'm not so sure. In software in particular, I think it's actually quite relevant what you can do in-house with a SOTA model (especially in the tool calling / fine tuning phase) that you just don't get with the same model via API. Think Cursor vs. Claude Code -- you can use the same model in Cursor, but the experience with CC is far and away better. I…

My gut feeling is that Claude Code being so popular is: - 60% just having a much better UX and having any amount of "taste", compared to Cursor - 39,9% being able to subsidize the raw token costs compared to what's being billed to Cursor - 0,1% some magical advantage by also training the model

Claude Code is just much _pleasant_ to use than most other tools, and I think people are overly discounting that aspect of it.

I'd rather use CC with slightly dumber model, than Cursor with a slightly better one; and I suspect I'm far from being the only one.

Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F

#549

Post by simianwords » Wed, Sep 03, 2025, 6:15 AM UTC

oblio wrote: post #524

simianwords wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

Are you predicting that they can't be net profitable?

Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F

#550

Post by lelanthran » Wed, Sep 03, 2025, 6:20 AM UTC

tick_tock_tick wrote: post #436

jayd16 wrote: 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?

> 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.

This doesn't seem correct. I run legacy models with only slightly reduced performance on 32GB RAM with a 12GB VRAM GPU right now. BTW, that's not an expensive setup.

> You think anyone is going to make money on that vs $20 a month to anthropic?

Why does it have to be run as a profit-making machine for other users? It can run as a useful service for the entire household, when running at home. After all, we're not talking about specialised coding agents using this[1], just normal user requests.

====================================

[1] For an outlay of $1k for a new GPU I can run a reduced-performance coding LLM. Once again, when it's only myself using it, the economics work out. I don't need the agent to be fully autonomous because I'm not vibe coding - I can take the reduced-performance output, fix it and use it.