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Anthropic confidentially submits draft S-1 to the SEC

anthropic.com

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

#431

Post by antasvara »

panarky wrote: post #224
pseudosavant wrote: post #197

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…

I'm not against a fundamentals-based argument. The revenue growth is wild and their margins are reported to be great. But the existential concern remains: what happens if models start plateauing?

I could be wrong, but the margins are so good because there isn't a "substitute" for the frontier models. The performance difference between the latest Opus and a more open model provider is large enough to justify the extra cost. If that difference shrinks, I think the cost people are willing to pay will go way down.

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

#432

Post by moljac024 »

antasvara wrote: post #431
panarky wrote: post #224

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'm not against a fundamentals-based argument. The revenue growth is wild and their margins are reported to be great. But the existential concern remains: what happens if models start plateauing? I could be wrong, but the margins are so good because there isn't a "substitute" for the frontier models. The performance difference between the latest Opus and a more open model provider is large enough to justify the extra…

I would argue models have been plateauing for quite some time now.

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

#433

Post by echoangle »

benl wrote: post #368
xracy wrote: post #348

Curious how someone with a 401k, who didn't want their retirement to be used by these companies to buy at an inflated price, would go about opting out of this. Typically I just have my 401k in an index fund so that things have to become established before they're added. This seems like it's circumventing that, and I would be inclined to vote with my wallet. But everything around 401k index funds that I see are very o…

Technically I think this would be fairly straightforward. You could keep the index fund and then short the stock you believe is overvalued, to the degree it's weighted in the index fund. That would give you stock market exposure equivalent to the index without the company you don't believe in. But I would strongly advise you to NOT DO THIS. The above position makes it explicit that your thesis involves shorting a sto…

You're paying a lot of premium if you buy a stock and then also short it to reduce your exposure.

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

#435

Post by BoggleOhYeah »

mnicky wrote: post #417
BoggleOhYeah wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You are correct. That’s what I intended to say but I see that worded that comment unclearly.

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

#436

Post by jhy »

bsder wrote: post #419
jhy wrote: post #415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Thanks, AltaVista LiveTopics is a good keyword. I found:

https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Alta-Vista-LiveTopic-Gra...

which has some different coverage.

I did try to archive the blog you linked but unfortunately the owner is blocking it with robots.txt

User-agent: ia_archiver Disallow: /

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

#437

Post by ethbr1 »

scoofy wrote: post #390
radicalbyte wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google was easily 10x better than any of their competition. It was effectively alone in the market. Most of us were using 56k modems to access the internet back then, Google's search returned results within a couple of seconds. Yahoo, Lycos, Excite, Alta-Vista were still loading. Then the search results themselves were so good you could often just pick the first result. They eventually added a button which just took…

Yea, that's easy to say now. I was a relatively early investor (2008), but I was very hesitant early on because Microsoft was building an integrated search function, which became Windows Live Search, which became Bing. I definitely remember it took me to the beginning of the financial crisis to finally decide that it was going nowhere. I suspect it was the development of Google Maps that changed my mind.

"Google" of today is really AdSense ($102M, 2003) -> Android ($50M+?, 2005) -> YouTube ($1.6B, 2006) -> Google Docs ($50M+?, 2006)

Without those prescient and lucky acquisitions, we'd be talking about a "Google" that looked much more like Yahoo.

It wasn't search proficiency that built the empire, it was leveraging a transient search quality advantage into cash flow, then plowing that cash into acquisitions to construct a durable moat.

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

#438

Post by BryantD »

bsder wrote: post #387
BryantD wrote: post #365

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.

It was a fun place to be. Sorry if I came across as curt — rereading that I was a bit more blunt than I intended. Sick cat has been stressing me.

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

#439

Post by lobocinza »

MagicMoonlight wrote: post #339
panarky wrote: post #224

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…

Anthropic is selling a commodity item that was just invented. It’s like investing in someone who is blowing lightbulb glass by hand. We’ve already seen a startup make a chip which generates a hundred pages of text in milliseconds. When companies start bringing out hardware like that for cutting edge models, the entire business is dead. AWS will just eat the market.

Anthropic is a software company.

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

#440

Post by BryantD »

panick21_ wrote: post #414
BryantD wrote: post #365

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…

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

I was not a software engineer but yeah, I think so. Every now and then we’d have to go get Mike Burrows to do some consulting work to rewrite a bit more of the code in assembly.
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