Live data from Hacker News

Anthropic raises $13B Series F

anthropic.com

341–350 of 661 posts

Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F

#341

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.

Tech Companies are valued at a multiple of next 12 months revenue, not last 12 months revenue. Since anthropic grew from $1billion to $5billion in revenue in ~8 months, that means it ~10x'ed revenue y/y off of 1 billion base. If you assume even 60% of that growth is retained (low for traditional saas businesses, but who knows), then anthropic is ~10% of google in terms of revenue in mid ~2027.

Basically, 5x-ing revenue in 8 months off of a billion dollars starting revenue is insane. Growing this quickly at this scale breaks every traditional valuation metric.

(And no - this doesn't include margins or COGS).

Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F

#342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's not pretend there aren't multitudes out there doing similar things who never get caught. SBF was just more egregious and untimely w/ his actions.

If you know of other SBFs, please name them so that we can call for their investigation and prosecution.

One doesn't need to go more than 2 feet into the mire of meme coins before finding the detritus of 6000000 rug pulls. Just that these guys never get prosecuted.

Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F

#343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We do seem to be hitting the top of the curve of diminishing returns. Forget AGI - they need a performance breakthrough in order to stop shoveling money into this cash furnace.

According to Dario, each model line has generally been profitable: i.e. $200MM to train a model that makes $1B in profit over its lifetime. But, since each model has been more and more expensive to train, they keep needing to raise more money to train the next generation of model, and the company balance sheet looks negative: i.e. they spent more this year than last (since the training cost for model N+1 is higher),…

What about inference costs?

Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F

#344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the Uber business plan - losing money until the competition loses more and goes out of business. So far Lyft seems to be doing okay, which proves the business plan doesn't really work.

Uber market cap makes places it in the top100 in the world, whereas Lyft is around 1/25th of Uber in market cap, and not even top1000. I would consider that a success... That is basically as much winner-takes-it-all one can realistically get in a global market. Cases where the top is just 5x the runner up would still be very winner oriented.

And in Europe Bolt is winning in many markets.

Taxi apps are a commodity today.

Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F

#345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The whole LLM era is horrible. All the innovation is coming "top-down" from very well funded companies - many of them tech incumbents, so you know the monetization is going to be awful. Since the models are expensive to run it's all subscription priced and has to run in the cloud where the user has no control. The hype is insane, and so usage is being pushed by C-suite folks who have no idea whether it's actually ben…

This is very pessimistic take. Where else do you think the innovation would come from? Take cloud for example - where did the innovation come from? It was from the top. I have no idea how you came to the conclusion that this implies monetization is going to be awful. How do you know models are expensive to run? They have gone down in price repeatedly in the last 2 years. Why do you assume it has to run in the cloud w…

C-suite is pushing business adoption, and those GenAI projects of which 95% are failing.

Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F

#346
post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a previous generation, the enabler of all our computer tech innovation was the incredible pace of compute growth due to Moore's Law, which was also "top-down" from very well-funded companies since designing and building cutting edge chips was (and still is) very, very expensive. The hype was insane, and decisions about what chip features to build were made largely on the basis of existing vendor relationships. Tho…

Eh, if this is true then IBM and Intel would still be the kings of the hill. Plenty of companies came from the bottom up out of nothing during the 90s and 2000s to build multi-billion dollar companies that are still dominate the market today. Many of those companies struggled for investment and grew over a long timeframe. The argument is something like that is not really possible anymore given the absurd upfront inve…

Anthropic has existed for a grand total of 4 years.

But yes, there was a window of opportunity when it was possible to do cutting-edge work without billions of investment. That window of opportunity is now past, at least for LLMs. Many new technologies follow a similar pattern.

Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F

#347

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 whole LLM era is horrible. All the innovation is coming "top-down" from very well funded companies - many of them tech incumbents, so you know the monetization is going to be awful. Since the models are expensive to run it's all subscription priced and has to run in the cloud where the user has no control. The hype is insane, and so usage is being pushed by C-suite folks who have no idea whether it's actually ben…

[flagged]

Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F

#348

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 whole LLM era is horrible. All the innovation is coming "top-down" from very well funded companies - many of them tech incumbents, so you know the monetization is going to be awful. Since the models are expensive to run it's all subscription priced and has to run in the cloud where the user has no control. The hype is insane, and so usage is being pushed by C-suite folks who have no idea whether it's actually ben…

> All the innovation is coming "top-down" from very well funded companies - many of them tech incumbents

What I always thought was exceptional is that it turns out it wasn't the incumbents who have the obvious advantage.

Take away the fact that everyone involved is already at the top 0.00001% echelon of the space (Sam Altman and everyone involved with the creation of OpenAI), but if you had asked me 10 years ago who will have the leg up creating advanced AI I would have said all the big companies hoarding data.

Turns out just having that data wasn't a starting requirement for the generation of models we have now.

A lot of the top players in the space are not the giant companies with unlimited resources.

Of course this isn't the web or web 2.0 era where to start something huge the starting capital was comparatively tiny, but it's interesting to see that the space allows for brand new companies to come out and be competitive against Google and Meta.

Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F

#349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Always makes you wonder how many companies that are successes today could’ve had their SBF moment, but market conditions kept them afloat

I think it's really objectionable to refer to this as an "SBF moment". It's not just about surviving a downtown and unforseen circumstances with some luck (like the sibling talking about FedEx barely making it). Tesla, for example, was famously extremely close to bankruptcy. But SBF got into the situation he was in due to his egregious fraud . The accounting at FTX was a criminal joke, with multiple sets of books, by…

Lol, tether, bitfinex are examples that came to mind. A lot of the OG crypto instutions got to where they are by "faking it till they made it" long enough to actually make it.

Does no one still remember that tether continually stalled audits FOR YEARS in the face of increasing scrutiny?

Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F

#350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is very pessimistic take. Where else do you think the innovation would come from? Take cloud for example - where did the innovation come from? It was from the top. I have no idea how you came to the conclusion that this implies monetization is going to be awful. How do you know models are expensive to run? They have gone down in price repeatedly in the last 2 years. Why do you assume it has to run in the cloud w…

C-suite is pushing business adoption, and those GenAI projects of which 95% are failing.

The other side of it is lots of users are willingly purchasing the subscription without any need of push.
Post reply on HN