Anthropic raises $13B Series F • Hacker News Board

Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F

#561

Post by lelanthran » Wed, Sep 03, 2025, 7:19 AM UTC

roncesvalles wrote: post #414

twostorytower wrote: post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't that just the right thing to do, statistically? Vegas has been operating profitably this way for decades.

It's not the same due to the Law of Large Numbers. The risk involved in many small 51% bets is very different from the risk in a single all-or-nothing 51% bet.

> The risk involved in many small 51% bets is very different from the risk in a single all-or-nothing 51% bet.

Right, but parent didn't say anything about an all-in bet, just double-or-nothing on a positive EV bet.

Frankly, I'd repeatedly bet on a positive EV bet too; it's a guaranteed win if you're allowed to go on for as long as you want to.

Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F

#562

Post by atleastoptimal » Wed, Sep 03, 2025, 7:21 AM UTC

pimlottc wrote: post #399

atleastoptimal wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nevertheless, prices for LLM at any given level of performance have gone down precipitously over the past few years. Regardless of how bad it seems the decisions being made are, the decision making process both is making an extreme amount of money for those in the AI companies, and providing extremely cheap and high quality intelligence for those using their offerings.

Remember when you could get an Uber ride all the way across town for $5? It is way too early to know what prices for these services will actually cost.

Is there an open source Uber? There are multiple open source AI models far beyond what SOTA was just 1 year ago. Even if they don't manage to drive prices down on the most recent closed models, they themselves will never be a trivial amount more than the compute they run on, and compute will only get more expensive if demand for AI continues to grow exponentially, which would likewise drive prices down due to competitive pressure.

Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F

#563

Post by oblio » Wed, Sep 03, 2025, 7:21 AM UTC

simianwords wrote: post #549

oblio wrote: post #524

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

No, I'm predicting that:

1. opportunity costs are a thing.

2. if you add Uber's financial numbers since creation, the crazy amount of VC that was invested Uber would have provided better returns by investing it in the S&P 500.

3. Uber will settle in as a boring, profitable company that's going to be a side note in both the history of tech and also of transportation and will primarily be remembered for eroding worker rights.

Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F

#564

Post by ikr678 » Wed, Sep 03, 2025, 7:42 AM UTC

majormajor wrote: post #519

reissbaker wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 order…

Back in my day, we called this a pyramid scheme.

Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F

#565

Post by aurareturn » Wed, Sep 03, 2025, 8:04 AM UTC

wmf wrote: post #186

vincefutr23 wrote: post #87

why would nvidia not create their own foundational model?

They have a bunch of Nemotron models. They can make more money from five(?) competing frontier labs than from trying to monopolize the frontier themselves.

I'm pretty sure Nemotron models are their internal teams dogfooding to learn more about the latest AI advancements in software.

Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F

#566

Post by utyop22 » Wed, Sep 03, 2025, 8:20 AM UTC

jryle70 wrote: post #475

utyop22 wrote: post #417

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Lol youre missing the point.

The WeWork investment proved Son never has an investment thesis - other than spray and pray.

Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F

#567

Post by utyop22 » Wed, Sep 03, 2025, 8:54 AM UTC

xpe wrote: post #490

utyop22 wrote: post #412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah you have to be careful on the internet in general TBH.

This place is better than much of the internet but still. Ah the dream would be to have this place somehow be filled with the experts on all topics and let them duel it out.

Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F

#568

Post by simianwords » Wed, Sep 03, 2025, 8:58 AM UTC

oblio wrote: post #563

simianwords wrote: post #549

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

No, I'm predicting that: 1. opportunity costs are a thing. 2. if you add Uber's financial numbers since creation, the crazy amount of VC that was invested Uber would have provided better returns by investing it in the S&P 500. 3. Uber will settle in as a boring, profitable company that's going to be a side note in both the history of tech and also of transportation and will primarily be remembered for eroding worker…

I don't get your point. You would have still made more money investing in Uber than in S&P.

Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F

#569

Post by utyop22 » Wed, Sep 03, 2025, 9:00 AM UTC

lelanthran wrote: post #559

ChadNauseam wrote: post #506

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The creation of wealth comes from trade, [...] I'm not sure to what extent you meant this, but I don't know that I'd agree with it. Trade allows specialization which does increase wealth massively, no doubt. And because of how useful specialization is, all wealth creation involves trade somewhere. But specialization is just one component of wealth creation. It stands alongside labor, innovation, and probably others…

>> > The creation of wealth comes from trade, [...] > I'm not sure to what extent you meant this, but I don't know that I'd agree with it. At a very foundational level, all wealth comes from trade, even when there is no currency involved. When two parties voluntarily make a trade, each party gets more value out of the trade than they had before, so the sum total of value after the trade is, by definition alone, great…

Ultimately real wealth is all about enhancing the well-being of individuals in society by way of an exchange of assets.

All we have done is become more elaborate and sophisticated in this stuff but at the core, its been the same throughout much of time.

Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F

#570

Post by utyop22 » Wed, Sep 03, 2025, 9:09 AM UTC

zmmmmm wrote: post #450

didip wrote: post #298

Everyone is so pessimistic about bubble bursting and money are simply catches on fire in this AI race… However, I remembered when Youtube was young. It was burning money every month on bandwidth. After selling out to Google, it took another decade to turned profit. But it did. And it achieved its end game. As the winner, it took all of the video hosting market. And Google reaped the entirety of that win. This AI race…

Youtube is fascinating to me because it never made any sense. At the time they were starting bandwidth was expensive. How the hell did they pay the bills for that? And then every single rational piece of logic said they would be sued to oblivion due to copyright violations. Logically, Youtube should have been impossible, but here it is. I often think about that when trying to evaluate forward looking tech. Even thoug…

Because there were external forces that helped propel and keep YT aloft. If smartphones and so on had not come into existence, it would have crashed and burned.

"Uber is similar - they shouldn't exist, they basically broke the law in most countries they moved into, brazenly violated all kinds of barriers that kept taxi industry completely entrenched for decades"

And here's a simple way to demonstrate my point - backed by VC - Uber accelerated its growth and got to the point it was so widely adopted nobody could stop them from operating.