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Anthropic confidentially submits draft S-1 to the SEC

anthropic.com

411–420 of 476 posts

Re: Anthropic confidentially submits draft S-1 to the SEC

#411
post #25

There is a mad rush to get these IPOs out the door before the market sneezes.

Anthropic unlike OpenAI has reached an operating profit of 559 million, which is really telling. They've also been migrating enterprise customers to API pricing, which is likely part of why they've become so profitable.

Profitability claims don't really add up. They are not clear about what accounting methods they are using, and even if they might somehow show profitable quarter, they stated in their leak of numbers to WSJ that they might not end up the year being profitable.

This is just to pump their numbers for the IPO, profitability is nowhere close until we see the real numbers.

Re: Anthropic confidentially submits draft S-1 to the SEC

#412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait till people find out you can have the same or close to the same output at 1/100th of a price. You cant possibly believe we'll be just spending more and more in tokens endlessly. And if the margins are so good for anthropic they will collapse. There's too much competition in the field.

I don’t believe similar scores on small bounded tasks mean models are interchangeable. I’ve found that heavy token-burning workflows are good for my productivity (letting multiple sessions run async working of different stuff). Claude ultracode is an easy example to point to, but there are tons of harnesses out there doing similar things. I find using a higher quality model matters because it affects how far it can g…

You can use Claude Code with DS4, I'm doing it as my daily driver.

Re: Anthropic confidentially submits draft S-1 to the SEC

#413

SpaceX submitted an amendment to their S-1 today[1] [1]: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1181412/000162828026...

The SpaceX IPO confuses me, with the kind of testing they do the stock price is going to be a roller coaster ride. Every splashdown with an explosion, even if planned, is going to impact the stock price. Are they hurting for cash? Why even IPO if you don't need the cash?

Knowing that investors in Elon's companies blatantly trust his lies, a rocket exploding here and there is not going to make a dent in the stock price.

Re: Anthropic confidentially submits draft S-1 to the SEC

#414
post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Alta-Vista were still loading Your memory is faulty. AltaVista was always super fast--it never had the advertising bloat that the other ones had until the very end. The problem AltaVista had was that it didn't scale when the Internet went exponential--so AltaVista would give you good search results until you asked current, topical questions. AltaVista relied on running a single, super-expensive stonking huge Alpha…

This is inaccurate. When I was running AV operations around 2000, we were running on a couple dozen huge Alpha machines for the index layer and queries. We had a bunch of smaller machines for Web serving, and a high memory set of Alphas as a caching layer. See https://www.usenix.org/legacy/publications/library/proceedin... for the 1997 server count, which was before we got to the three tier architecture. We also spid…

From the oral history interviews, it seem one of the tricks was keeping the core algorithm in cache completely.

Re: Anthropic confidentially submits draft S-1 to the SEC

#415
post #387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is inaccurate. When I was running AV operations around 2000, we were running on a couple dozen huge Alpha machines for the index layer and queries. We had a bunch of smaller machines for Web serving, and a high memory set of Alphas as a caching layer. See https://www.usenix.org/legacy/publications/library/proceedin... for the 1997 server count, which was before we got to the three tier architecture. We also spid…

I stand corrected. Thanks for all your work. And I still miss the AltaVista illustrated diagram (Java Applet) that would allow you to drill down and specialize the search results. No modern search has ever matched that, again.

That feature sounds amazing! I tried searching wayback etc but wasn't able to find any more details. Do you happen to know of any screenshots / deeper descriptions for it?

Perhaps we could nerd snipe Marginalia Search to add it :)

Re: Anthropic confidentially submits draft S-1 to the SEC

#416

Up until this point, the potential for an AI bust blast radius was limited to corporate investors, but this is going to cause regular retail/401k investors to get exposure, which could have far bigger impacts on a downturn. Not to mention the insane wake-up call it is going to be for these AI stocks when 3 months after they launch they have to start making earnings calls and showing their financials. That quarter-by-…

If we're doing historical comparisons, there was so much hype for AOL and Yahoo that drove valuations far beyond the economics. In time, the hypesters were proved wrong. In contrast, there was overwhelming doom and gloom for Google's IPO, in spite of their incredible growth and margin economics. In time, the doomers were proved wrong. There's so much doom and gloom about Anthropic that directly contradicts their asto…

Revenue growth might be great, inference margins might be great. Where's the moat?

Re: Anthropic confidentially submits draft S-1 to the SEC

#417
post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good thing is that index funds don't hold stocks at market capitalization but only at free float value. So a company whose shares are mostly held by founders, employees, and strategic investors gets a weight well below its headline valuation.

Most don’t. The one that is the center of much of the controversy around these IPOs, NASDAQ-100, doesn’t use float adjustments. A lot of people have been using it to passively invest in AI (via QQQ). It’s nonsensical for a variety of reasons but we live an era of the stock market just being another casino…

I believe it's the opposite :) All major indices (S&P500, MSCI, FTSE...) use free-float adjustments. And recently also NASDAQ - they've changed to cap of 3x the value of free-floating shares.

Re: Anthropic confidentially submits draft S-1 to the SEC

#418
post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we're doing historical comparisons, there was so much hype for AOL and Yahoo that drove valuations far beyond the economics. In time, the hypesters were proved wrong. In contrast, there was overwhelming doom and gloom for Google's IPO, in spite of their incredible growth and margin economics. In time, the doomers were proved wrong. There's so much doom and gloom about Anthropic that directly contradicts their asto…

"until I can get a few shares at a reasonable valuation" I doubt you will. Most likely IPO reference price will be like SpaceX's, 100x ARR or so. You're better off buying Google who own a huge chunk of Anthropic at a much saner average.

For reference, here's an NYU prof's website which shows typical ARR valuation multipliers by industry (see Price/Sales ratio column):

https://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~adamodar/New_Home_Page/datafile...

100x is staggering. These companies are priced as though we are already chewing through the solar system to create AI computronium. I'll pass--I expect I'll get a UBI when that scenario happens anyway.

Re: Anthropic confidentially submits draft S-1 to the SEC

#419
post #415
post #387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I stand corrected. Thanks for all your work. And I still miss the AltaVista illustrated diagram (Java Applet) that would allow you to drill down and specialize the search results. No modern search has ever matched that, again.

That feature sounds amazing! I tried searching wayback etc but wasn't able to find any more details. Do you happen to know of any screenshots / deeper descriptions for it? Perhaps we could nerd snipe Marginalia Search to add it :)

I remember it being a Java applet with animations, but my memory could be terribly faulty at this point.

Following your comments and trying to trail things out, the only thing I can find is a reference to AltaVista LiveTopics.

https://dannysullivan.com/why-search-sucks-you-wont-fix-it-t...

I suspect what I used was that "GRAPH" button in the AltaVista Refine picture.

We might want to archive that image. It seems like the only evidence that this stuff ever existed.

Re: Anthropic confidentially submits draft S-1 to the SEC

#420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we're doing historical comparisons, there was so much hype for AOL and Yahoo that drove valuations far beyond the economics. In time, the hypesters were proved wrong. In contrast, there was overwhelming doom and gloom for Google's IPO, in spite of their incredible growth and margin economics. In time, the doomers were proved wrong. There's so much doom and gloom about Anthropic that directly contradicts their asto…

I don't see how they can keep their margins with all the pressure from Chinise models. It got to be race to the bottom on margins. They (together with OpenAI and maybe Google) can have better margins on frontier models, but the demand on those got to be much lower

Exactly. Many people will choose the cheapest possible model that's smart enough for their use case. "Frontier" is a transient property; open models tend to catch up in 6 months or so.
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