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Anthropic raises $65B in Series H funding at $965B post-money valuation

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111–120 of 458 posts

Re: Anthropic raises $65B in Series H funding at $965B post-money valuation

#111
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not so sure. We only need to look at Uber’s example of companies realizing they’re spending way too much and trying to rein it in. Claude has excellent revenue but it is highly dependent on very rich technology companies continuing to spend lavishly without seeing returns. The music will stop at some point and Anthropic will be hit the hardest. OpenAI may have less revenue but it is distributed across many, many…

Every week there's at least one post on the HN front page bitching about API errors from Claude because Anthropic doesn't have enough serving capacity. I really don't see any signs they're "spending too much", the actual evidence on the ground seems to be exactly the opposite: constant exasperation that they're not spending enough.

Unlike OpenAI, a lot of Claude's infra problems are self-inflicted and not completely raw-capacity related.

Re: Anthropic raises $65B in Series H funding at $965B post-money valuation

#112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Effectively infinite. Databricks is a good example. They're still private after 13 years and closed a Series L round last year. Stripe is similar. Having been through an IPO before, it was good for employee liquidity, but bad for the culture and long-term success of the company.

so how do stripe employees get liquidity? can anyone sell their secondary shares?

regular tender offers

Re: Anthropic raises $65B in Series H funding at $965B post-money valuation

#113
post #89
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which also leaves OpenAI vulnerable to NVidia's aggressive pricing. To my knowledge Anthropic is relatively well positioned across multiple compute vendors/hardware providers.

It also leaves OpenAI vulnerable to any GPU breakthroughs. You could imagine company X comes up with a XPU that is 100% faster than what's currently there.* * NVidia GPU, Google TPU, Apple SoC, etc.

We are still in the short-half-life phase of GPUs. If a 2x faster GPU is on the horizon, why wouldn't OpenAI already be in line to buy? They aren't buying just 1, they are buying multiple datacenters' worth. So they wouldn't be a low priority, back of the line customer.

A short half-life means you are going to quickly dispose of what you have now, anyway. In fact most current datacenters can't even handle Vera Rubin, so I don't think there's short term risk here.

Re: Anthropic raises $65B in Series H funding at $965B post-money valuation

#114
post #86
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The acceleration rate has been extraordinary… they went from mostly unknown outside AI circles to the number one player almost overnight. If that’s not “blown past” I don’t know what is.

The branding of Claude is so much stronger than ChatGPT. Even Anthropic is such better branding than OpenAI (especially considering they're not open at all). My wife knows about Claude because that's what I use and we pay for. She uses it also as a result. And inevitably she will talk about Claude to her friends.

> The branding of Claude is so much stronger than ChatGPT.

Absolutely not, you live in a bubble. Everybody knows about ChatGPT.

Few non-programmers have heard of anthropic or claude, nor do they care. But they all know what ChatGPT is.

Re: Anthropic raises $65B in Series H funding at $965B post-money valuation

#115
post #86
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The acceleration rate has been extraordinary… they went from mostly unknown outside AI circles to the number one player almost overnight. If that’s not “blown past” I don’t know what is.

The branding of Claude is so much stronger than ChatGPT. Even Anthropic is such better branding than OpenAI (especially considering they're not open at all). My wife knows about Claude because that's what I use and we pay for. She uses it also as a result. And inevitably she will talk about Claude to her friends.

OpenAI is as open as Anthropic is anthropic.

Re: Anthropic raises $65B in Series H funding at $965B post-money valuation

#116
post #52
post #12

Probably the bigger headline here is that they’ve blown past OpenAI in revenue and valuation, with OpenAI looking increasingly shaky and vulnerable.

Anthropic is at the mercy of 3rd party datacenter contracts. AFAIK OpenAI will soon run mostly on on their own GPUs. I don't like Altman and I am still upset about his memory deal last year but he prepared for the current shortages months before anybody else. Meanwhile, Anthropic seems to lack any plans besides third party contracting. IMHO they got very lucky with xAI and Google having spare capacity and willing to…

> their own GPUs

Everyone has critical risk on multiple parts of the supply chain. GPUs and Memory are just things OAI mitigated for.

Power - Bigger bottleneck than GPU or RAM perhaps, New Grid connected capacity is typically 10+ year timescale with lot of regulatory friction. Captive capacity is also quite constrained - now Gas turbines have 7+ year wait time.

There are plenty of hard constraints that OAI cannot easily solve either.

Re: Anthropic raises $65B in Series H funding at $965B post-money valuation

#117
post #89
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which also leaves OpenAI vulnerable to NVidia's aggressive pricing. To my knowledge Anthropic is relatively well positioned across multiple compute vendors/hardware providers.

It also leaves OpenAI vulnerable to any GPU breakthroughs. You could imagine company X comes up with a XPU that is 100% faster than what's currently there.* * NVidia GPU, Google TPU, Apple SoC, etc.

You have missed the point

Nvidia has probably monopolized several upstream supplies to manufacture critical chip components for next 2 years, the HBMs and Optics component from LITE, as well as TSM capacity. Let alone those power components they funded themselves.

Let's say you have a genius design, but you will have it close to impossible to compete with Nvidia in getting it to volumes.

Jensen is a player, he isn't fooling around with all these Asian trips just to wine and dine

Re: Anthropic raises $65B in Series H funding at $965B post-money valuation

#118

Anthropic has a great product, but what's going on in the stock market is astonishing. Companies waiting to be valued at a trillion dollars before going public? (I'm writing this comment with the assumption that they will go public soon and the valuation will be higher than this $965 billion dollar private valuation) The stock market used to be a place for companies to raise money from investors. But that isn't what…

If they could have gone public, they probably would have. I hope they do, their S1 might be good meme material.

Companies that reached a level of maturity where going public make sense don't keep doing funding rounds to cover the rate at which they bleed money.

Re: Anthropic raises $65B in Series H funding at $965B post-money valuation

#119

Anthropic has a great product, but what's going on in the stock market is astonishing. Companies waiting to be valued at a trillion dollars before going public? (I'm writing this comment with the assumption that they will go public soon and the valuation will be higher than this $965 billion dollar private valuation) The stock market used to be a place for companies to raise money from investors. But that isn't what…

> But that isn't what it is anymore, it's a dumping ground. We got "dumped" Google and Facebook, so... Those probably made up for all the other "dumps". We also got "dumped" TSLA, which is meme-ing in the trillions at the moment. You can short Anthropic at IPO if you want...

Or he can just steer clear of the eventual Anthropic stock. Shorting is not the only strategy available to avoid losing money.

But you, of course, can buy on their IPO. They need every bagholder they can get :)

Re: Anthropic raises $65B in Series H funding at $965B post-money valuation

#120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Effectively infinite. Databricks is a good example. They're still private after 13 years and closed a Series L round last year. Stripe is similar. Having been through an IPO before, it was good for employee liquidity, but bad for the culture and long-term success of the company.

so how do stripe employees get liquidity? can anyone sell their secondary shares?

There's a newish term for this: RLO, Recurring Liquidity Opportunity. These are tender offers at some recurring interval. Even some companies that have a shorter lifespan (say 7 years) offer this.
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