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Anthropic taps IPO lawyers as it races OpenAI to go public

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Re: Anthropic taps IPO lawyers as it races OpenAI to go public

#301

Post by Traster »

nextworddev wrote: post #117

interesting HN is so bearish considering most of them spend more on AI daily than any other saas category

There's a difference between a good product and a good business. It's easy to see this is a great product but it's really difficult to see how it's a great business. All the traditional things we look for from great businesses seem to be absent here - they don't have network effects like facebook or uber, they don't have lock-in they way Apple has, and to a large extent they don't have the traditional economics of SAAS. They have a product that is interchangeable with 3 or 4 other companies, they have extremely high initial investment costs to train models, and it's not clear they can actually sell tokens for more than it costs to make them.

It's like the foundry business, an ever increasing cost of moving to the next node requires ever increasing scale which naturally kills off competition.

Re: Anthropic taps IPO lawyers as it races OpenAI to go public

#302

Post by apercu »

aurareturn wrote: post #286
apercu wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And, if your revenue is $1B but your costs are $2B it only lasts until the music stops....

How many times are people going to repeat this lazy statement? If claude code's revenue grows faster than cost, it will become profitable.

"If claude code's revenue grows faster than cost, it will become profitable."

No shit?

Re: Anthropic taps IPO lawyers as it races OpenAI to go public

#303

Post by turnsout »

blitzar wrote: post #280
turnsout wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, repackaging and reselling AI is a starkly better business than creating frontier models

Finding a use for Ai will be an even better business.

If you can't find a use for AI, you probably haven't given it much of a try. Just one random example: I needed to find experts in a technical field, and gave the problem to Claude Code. Claude put together a comprehensive research plan, dug deep into industry working groups, and produced a prioritized list of experts along with their bios, rationale and LinkedIn profiles.

Completely possible for me to do, but it saved me at least a couple hours of Googling.

Re: Anthropic taps IPO lawyers as it races OpenAI to go public

#304

Post by blinding-streak »

dwaltrip wrote: post #191
apercu wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And, if your revenue is $1B but your costs are $2B it only lasts until the music stops....

I don’t think they are losing money on inference. Model training, sure. But that will slow down at some point.

Why do you think so? Seems like the space is fiercely competitive, I would expect it to get more expensive.

Re: Anthropic taps IPO lawyers as it races OpenAI to go public

#305

Post by HarHarVeryFunny »

aurareturn wrote: post #284
efficax wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google had PageRank, which gave them much better quality results (and they got users to stick with them by offering lots of free services (like gmail) that were better quality than existing paid services). The difference was night and day compared to the best other search engines at the time (WebCrawler was my goto, then sometimes AltaVista). The quality difference between "foundation" models is nil. Even the huge mo…

PageRank wasn't that much better. It was better and the word spread. Google also had a very clean UI at a time where websites like Excite and Yahoo had super bloated pages. That was the differentiation. What makes you think AI companies can't find moats similar to Google's? The right UX, the right model and a winner can race past everyone.

> PageRank wasn't that much better

It really was!

I remember the pre-Google days when AltaVista was the best search engine, just doing keyword matching, and of course you would therefore have to wade through pages of results to hopefully find something of interest.

Google was like night & day. PageRank meant that typically the most useful results would be on the first page.

Re: Anthropic taps IPO lawyers as it races OpenAI to go public

#306

Post by epiccoleman »

ewoodrich wrote: post #233
epiccoleman wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Claude Code is the moat (though I definitely recognize it's a pretty shallow moat). I don't want to switch to Codex or whatever the Gemini CLI is, I like Claude Code and I've gotten used to how it works. Again, I know that's a shallow moat - agents just aren't that complex from a pure code perspective, and there are already tools that you can use to proxy Claude Code's requests out to different models. But at…

I went from: 1. using Claude Code exclusively (back when it really was on another level from the competition) to 2. switching back and forth with CC using the Z.ai GLM 4.6 backend (very close to a drop-in replacement these days) due to CC massively cutting down the quota on the Claude Pro plan to 3. now primarily using OpenCode with the Claude Code backend, or Sonnet 4.5 Github Copilot backend, or Z.ai GLM 4.6 backen…

You've convinced me to give OpenCode a try!

Re: Anthropic taps IPO lawyers as it races OpenAI to go public

#307

Post by neilv »

6510 wrote: post #275
neilv wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's kind of funny, you can ask Rufus for stuff like "write a hello world in python for me" and then it will do it and also recommend some python books. From a perspective of "how do we monetize AI chatbots", an easy thing about this usage context is that the consumer is already expecting and wanting product recommendations. (If you saw this behavior with ChatGPT, it wouldn't go down as well, until you were conditi…

There are really impressive marketing/advertisement formulas to be had. I wont share mine but I'm sure there are many ways to go step by step from not-customers to customers where each step has a known monetary value. If an LLM does something impressive in one of the steps you also know what it is worth.

I have an approach for multiple of these steps, which involves adapting a kind of non-LLMs respected authority tech approach (my previous side project), to LLMs.

I think it can be done right now with MCP servers in a way that you don't immediately hand over your data to the chatbot portal companies so that they can cut you out. (But, over time/traffic, they could quickly learn to mimick your MCP server, much like they mimick Web content and other training data, and at least appear to casual users to interact like you, even if twisted to push whatever company bid for the current user interaction. I haven't figured out what you do when they've trained on mimicking you with an evil twin; maybe you get acquired early, and then there are more resources to solve that next problem.)

Re: Anthropic taps IPO lawyers as it races OpenAI to go public

#308

Post by nextworddev »

Traster wrote: post #301
nextworddev wrote: post #117

interesting HN is so bearish considering most of them spend more on AI daily than any other saas category

There's a difference between a good product and a good business. It's easy to see this is a great product but it's really difficult to see how it's a great business. All the traditional things we look for from great businesses seem to be absent here - they don't have network effects like facebook or uber, they don't have lock-in they way Apple has, and to a large extent they don't have the traditional economics of SA…

(checks Anthropic's ARR growth) you are wrong

Re: Anthropic taps IPO lawyers as it races OpenAI to go public

#309

Post by baobabKoodaa »

JimDabell wrote: post #213
baobabKoodaa wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And 12 months later Anthropic is listing 200 open positions for humans: https://www.anthropic.com/jobs

Of course they are. The two things aren’t contradictory at all, in fact one strongly implies the other. If AI is writing 90% of your code, that means the total contribution of a developer is 10× the code they would write without AI. This means you get way more value per developer, so why wouldn’t you keep hiring developers? This idea that “AI writes 90% of our code” means you don’t need developers seems to spring fro…

You said:

> The two things aren’t contradictory at all, in fact one strongly implies the other. If AI is writing 90% of your code, that means the total contribution of a developer is 10× the code they would write without AI. This means you get way more value per developer, so why wouldn’t you keep hiring developers?

Let's review the original claim:

> AI will replace 90% of developers within 6 months

Notice that the original claim does not say "developers will remain the same amount, they will just be 10x more effective". It says the opposite of what you claim it says. The word "replace" very clearly implies loss of job.

Re: Anthropic taps IPO lawyers as it races OpenAI to go public

#310

Post by baobabKoodaa »

njdancer wrote: post #232
JimDabell wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course they are. The two things aren’t contradictory at all, in fact one strongly implies the other. If AI is writing 90% of your code, that means the total contribution of a developer is 10× the code they would write without AI. This means you get way more value per developer, so why wouldn’t you keep hiring developers? This idea that “AI writes 90% of our code” means you don’t need developers seems to spring fro…

See Jevons paradox: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

Here's the claim again for you:

> AI will replace 90% of developers within 6 months

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