101–110 of 166 posts
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it's a number 2 years out of date. they invested 8b and ant is now worth 183b.
That doesn't tell us what percentage they own, though. When you invest in a company and the value goes up, your percentage doesn't change (unless there are additional investors)
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I'm on like my fifth once in a generation financial crisis. At a certain point you just expect it.
How are you getting 5? In recent memory, there's only 3: dotcom bubble (2000), GFC (2008), covid (2020). You'd either have to go back in time even more (eg. savings and loan crisis in the 80s/90s), or include regional ones (eg. eurozone crisis) to hit 5.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/August_2011_stock_markets_fall
I have sat with these numbers for a great deal of time, and I can’t find any evidence that Anthropic has any path to profitability outside of aggressively increasing the prices on their customers to the point that its services will become untenable for consumers and enterprise customers alike. This is where he misunderstands. Enterprise companies will absolutely pay 10x the cost for Claude. Meta and Apple are two lar…
I suppose that's the pessimistic-on-AI side. On the other hand, once you create God little things like money are meaningless.
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Correct. And yet, he's provided some of the most level headed takes on the current LLM boom, to the point where FT Alphaville link to his analysis of the economics.
FT Alphaville dissed bitcoin and Tesla for 10 years. Not the greatest track record.
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if you are worried about AWS spend, i have news for you about non AWS spend. "coming soon" is also really over simplistic. you would have missed some of the greatest tech companies in the past 20 years if you evaluated startups based on their early-year revenue vs infra spend like sure i have a dog in this fight but i actually want the criticism to sharpen my thinking, unfortunately yours does not meet that bar.
are you glossing over the whole "aws bill isnt structural infra spend" thing?! they spend 104% of revenue on ONE cloud provider and costs scale linearly with revenue growth. assume zitron didn't pull these numbers out of his ass. educate me how this isnt selling $20 bills for $5. you're a smart dude; i myself aint seeing the "sustainable business practices" here
pull up Uber's financials leading up to IPO. unsustainable and everyone knew it. they work it out after because they burned money and eventually achieved a sustainable moat. this is why venture exists. HN doesnt like venture which is, well, ironic given the domain we're on.
a better negative argument i'd rather see looks like this - "ive run these aws numbers against the typical spend path of pre IPO startups who then later improved their cost baseline and margin profile and even after accounting for all that, Anthropic ngmi". thats the kind of minimum sophistication you need here to play armchair financial analyst. ed zitron, and everyone involved in this entire thread, incl myself, have not done that because we are lazy and ignorant and dont actually care enough about seeking the truth here. we are as unprepared to analyze this AWS spend as we are to understand their 1b -> 10b revenue ramp in 2025. you havent done the work and yet you sit here and judge it unsustainable based off some shitty "leaks". dont pretend that ed's analysis is at all meaningful particularly because he conveniently stops where it supports his known negative bias.
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> If he is level-headed, show me an Ed article that is positive about AI Why should those two things go together?
If 1 Billion people voluntarily use a product and many claim to be productive, there must be something good about the product right? But I guess Ed Zitron has found his audience
That said, I hope they're using their prime Visa card so they can get some cash back on that spend.
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Right, but if I understand you, the counterargument is dumb since the context in which we are discussing is business viability (vcs investing in businesses where the unit economics require inference cost decreases), so actual dollars out rather than some imaginary cost per token is the metric that matters. Inference is getting so much cheaper that cursor and zed have had to raise prices.
> so actual dollars out rather than some imaginary cost per token is the metric that matters. Even if we take this as true, the point is that this is different than "the cost of inference isn't going down." It is going down, it's just that people want more performance, and are willing to pay for it. Spend going up is not the same as cost going up. I don't disagree that there are a wide variety of things to talk about…
The cost of inference -- ie $ that go to your llm api provider -- has increased and certainly appears to continue to increase.
see also https://ethanding.substack.com/p/ai-subscriptions-get-short-...
I think this is a minor speed bump and VC’s believe that cost of inference will decrease over time and this is a gold rush to grab market share while cost of inference declines. I don’t think they got it right and the market share and usage grew faster than inference dropped, but inference costs will clearly drop and these companies will eventually be very profitable. Reality is that startups like this assume moore’s…
Isn't the consensus that the MOE architecture and other optimizations in the newest gen models (GPT-5, Gemini 3.0 to come, etc) will reduce inference costs by 50-75% already?
Price-performance though? The trend is clear: a given level of LLM capability keeps getting cheaper, and that trend is expected to hold. Improvements in architecture and training make LLMs more capability-dense, and advanced techniques make inference cheaper.