Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Anthropic raises $13B Series F

anthropic.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 661 posts

Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F

#111

Post by docdeek »

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…

> 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.

For what it is worth, $13 billion is about the GDP of Somalia (about 150th in nomimal GDP) with a population of 15 million people.

Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F

#112

Post by matheist »

StopDisinfo910 wrote: post #37
aaronblohowiak wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

alphabet is "worth" 2.45 trillion on the public market, is anthropic worth a bit less than 10% of google going forward? I don't think that's entirely unreasonable...

Alphabet 2024 revenue: 350 billions dollars Anthropic 2024 revenue: 1 billion dollars Unreasonable doesn’t even start to capture it. Anthropic being worth 10% of Alphabet is beyond insane.

Valuation includes expected future growth, it's not just present value of future revenue given today's numbers.

You may not agree with the market's estimation of that, but comparing just present revenue isn't really the right comparison.

Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F

#113

Post by yieldcrv »

duxup wrote: post #34
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…

It's not clear to me that each new generation of models is going to be "that" much better vs cost. Anecdotally moving from model to model I'm not seeing huge changes in many use cases. I can just pick an older model and often I can't tell the difference... Video seems to be moving forward fast from what I can tell, but it sounds like the back end cost of compute there is skyrocketing with it raising other questions.

Locally run video models that are just as good as today’s closed models are going to be the watershed moment

The companies doing foundational video models have stakeholders that don’t want to be associated with what people really want to generate

But they are pushing the space forward and the uncensored and unrestricted video model is coming

Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F

#114

Post by AnimalMuppet »

Symmetry wrote: post #74
stravant wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That assumes he would have stopped with the shenanigans, which is a pretty big if.

Proudly proclaiming on the Conversations With Tyler podcast that given a double or nothing bet with a 51% chance of success he'd keep playing forever.

Not forever. He'd have nothing soon enough.

Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F

#115

Post by throw310822 »

datadrivenangel wrote: post #80
aaronblohowiak wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

alphabet is "worth" 2.45 trillion on the public market, is anthropic worth a bit less than 10% of google going forward? I don't think that's entirely unreasonable...

It's both insane and not unreasonable. If Anthropic's internal version of Claude Code gets so good that they can recreate all of google's products quickly there's no moat anymore. If AI is winner take all, then the value is effectively infinite. Obviously insane, but maybe it's winner take most?

It's the techno-hubristic version of Pascal's wager. The reward for the existence of God is infinite, so it worth investing all the money in the world to create one.

Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F

#116

Post by UltraSane »

mapt wrote: post #82
nradov wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's why wealthy investors connected to the AI industry are also throwing a lot of money into power generation startups, particularly fusion power. I doubt that any of them will actually deliver commercially viable fusion reactors but hope springs eternal.

Continuing to carve out economies of scale in battery + photovoltaic for another ten doublings has plenty of positive externalities. The problem is that in the meantime, they're going to nuke our existing powergrid, created in the 1920's to 1950's to serve our population as it was in the 1970's, and for the most part not expanded since. All of the delta is in price-mediated "demand reduction" of existing users.

A lot of the biggest data centers being built are also building behind the meter generation dedicated to them.

Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F

#117

Post by lofaszvanitt »

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…

Nvidia needs to grow.

Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F

#118

Post by bravetraveler »

worldsayshi wrote: post #97
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…

And we're still sort of on the fence if it's even that useful? Like sure it saves me a bit of time here and there but will scaling up really solve the reliability issues that is the real bottleneck.

Assuming the best case: we're going to need to turn this productivity into houses or lifestyle improvement, soon... or I'm just going out with Sasquatch

Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F

#119

Post by fredoliveira »

me551ah wrote: post #64
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…

And distillation makes the compute moat irrelevant. You could spend trillions to train a model, but some companies is going to get enough data from your model and distill it's own at a much cheaper upfront cost. This would allow them to offer them for cheaper inference cost too, totally defeating the point of spending crazy money on training.

A couple of counter-arguments:

Labs can just step up the way they track signs of prompts meant for model distillation. Distillation requires a fairly large number of prompt/response tuples, and I am quite certain that all of the main labs have the capability to detect and impede that type of use if they put their backs into it.

Distillation doesn't make the compute moat irrelevant. You can get good results from distillation, but (intuitively, maybe I'm wrong here because I haven't done evals on this myself) you can't beat the upstream model in performance. That means that most (albeit obviously not all) customers will simply gravitate toward the better performing model if the cost/token ratio is aligned for them.

Are there always going to be smaller labs? Sure, yes. Is the compute mote real, and does it matter? Absolutely.

Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F

#120

Post by Zigurd »

seneca wrote: post #43
aaronblohowiak wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

alphabet is "worth" 2.45 trillion on the public market, is anthropic worth a bit less than 10% of google going forward? I don't think that's entirely unreasonable...

It feels a bit unreasonable to me. Anthropic is arguably comparable to Google's Gemini program. Is Gemini 10% of Alphabet's value? If so, how much of that is because of its ability to consume and interact with things like YouTube and Workspaces? I could see two or three percent, but this seems like a pretty big stretch. Then again, I'm not a VC.

To make a similar comparison, Alphabet's Waymo has AV's that actually work. But they're not capturing 80% of Tesla's valuation.
Post reply on HN