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Anthropic confidentially submits draft S-1 to the SEC

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Re: Anthropic confidentially submits draft S-1 to the SEC

#361

Post by martinald »

xracy wrote: post #350
martinald wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it? I thought the idea was diversity of risk, not "mitigating risk". You clearly don't want 100% of your 401k in OpenAI or Anthropic. But you probably do want 1 or 2% of it in, to give you the long term growth potential? Regardless SPY is actually a pretty "risky" index fund on some measures - it pays a (very) low dividend compared to many other intl/ETF funds and is weighted very heavily towards tech stocks (atm)…

> Is it? Given that they've had to change the rules of index funds to allow for this, yes, this is not what people expect.

But the US has never had $1T+ IPOs before. And also a huge amount of enormous private companies that don't want to go public for various reasons.

Also, the rules have changed before. It's not the first time these rules have changed.

I see both sides of the argument (it's definitely _not_ good for 401k investors if Anthropic/OpenAI/SpaceX make huge leaps in technology that allow for far higher earnings that they aren't able to access, for example).

But my main point is that these investors regardless would "only" have 5% exposure to these. That surely cannot be considered a systemic risk that the OP is inferring.

Re: Anthropic confidentially submits draft S-1 to the SEC

#362

Post by gizajob »

pseudosavant wrote: post #226
bwhiting2356 wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazon was founded in 1994

And who would have thought it was the online bookstore that would be the big survivor of the dotcom era? They were a comparatively small player relative to AOL/Yahoo/etc at the time of the dotcom bust. Which company is the 1994 Amazon of AI now?

Apple.

Re: Anthropic confidentially submits draft S-1 to the SEC

#363

Post by softwaredoug »

pseudosavant wrote: post #197

Up until this point, the potential for an AI bust blast radius was limited to corporate investors, but this is going to cause regular retail/401k investors to get exposure, which could have far bigger impacts on a downturn. Not to mention the insane wake-up call it is going to be for these AI stocks when 3 months after they launch they have to start making earnings calls and showing their financials. That quarter-by-…

OTOH it’s pretty bad if the the general public can’t participate in the upside of AI and it’s only concentrated in a few private investors.

Re: Anthropic confidentially submits draft S-1 to the SEC

#364

Post by gizajob »

nostrademons wrote: post #164
reacharavindh wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As unlikely it is to happen at scale, as a thought process - what would happen if people start selling those index funds in a mad rush? Just drives the transaction volume because those with that new money will just buy something else in the market? I know SpaceX, Anthropic, and OpenAI will probably be a drop in the bucket in terms of scale of these funds, (free float % etc). But, is it realistic to take the money out…

If people actually dumped index funds for cash en masse it would be catastrophic. To attach some numbers, MSFT averages about 35M shares in daily volume, and that includes all the market makers, HFTs, etc. BlackRock (iShares) owns 593M shares of MSFT and Vanguard owns another 482M. Together, the amount of shares that index funds own is about a month and a half of total trading volumes. I'd bet that such a crash would…

If you hit sell on a vanguard ETF and it sells on the market, then Vanguard isn’t the buyer is it? So in that situation with everyone dumping ETFs there would be a lag on the time taken for the ETF to sell and Vanguard to then dump the stocks back out in the market. It’s never occurred to me the situation where huge numbers of people dump index funds and how Vanguard/Blackrock account for that without becoming bag holders of the underlying stocks themselves.

In any case, I’m not sure that large enough numbers of ETF holders are sitting close enough “to the button” to hit sell in the event of a sharp downturn occurring over the space of even a week or two. And a lot of them would see it as an opportunity to DCA into the dip anyway.

Re: Anthropic confidentially submits draft S-1 to the SEC

#365

Post by BryantD »

bsder wrote: post #344
radicalbyte wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google was easily 10x better than any of their competition. It was effectively alone in the market. Most of us were using 56k modems to access the internet back then, Google's search returned results within a couple of seconds. Yahoo, Lycos, Excite, Alta-Vista were still loading. Then the search results themselves were so good you could often just pick the first result. They eventually added a button which just took…

> Alta-Vista were still loading Your memory is faulty. AltaVista was always super fast--it never had the advertising bloat that the other ones had until the very end. The problem AltaVista had was that it didn't scale when the Internet went exponential--so AltaVista would give you good search results until you asked current, topical questions. AltaVista relied on running a single, super-expensive stonking huge Alpha…

This is inaccurate. When I was running AV operations around 2000, we were running on a couple dozen huge Alpha machines for the index layer and queries. We had a bunch of smaller machines for Web serving, and a high memory set of Alphas as a caching layer.

See https://www.usenix.org/legacy/publications/library/proceedin... for the 1997 server count, which was before we got to the three tier architecture.

We also spidered constantly. A couple of those huge backend Alphas were dedicated to holding the constant spider index. AV had a well earned reputation for quick discovery, although I think Google wound up faster. We suffered a bit from maintaining separate indexes for the main corpus and recent pages, and I imagine Google handled that better.

But the period of time when our main index went to hell was the period of time when we failed to do a new main index crawl for several months. I won’t get into why that happened politically because my memory isn’t perfect and I don’t want to criticize anyone who won’t see this to stand up for themselves, but it’s absolutely the case that we let the index get stale.

And I will say that I think the execs were distracted by the idea of challenging Yahoo by buying a shopping site and a local news site of sorts and, unlike the Google of the time, they lacked the wisdom to focus on our primary product.

And now I fade back into the hedges, until the next time AV comes up… I suspect a high percentage of my HN comments are on this exact topic. It makes me sad.

Re: Anthropic confidentially submits draft S-1 to the SEC

#366

Post by neonstatic »

pseudosavant wrote: post #197

Up until this point, the potential for an AI bust blast radius was limited to corporate investors, but this is going to cause regular retail/401k investors to get exposure, which could have far bigger impacts on a downturn. Not to mention the insane wake-up call it is going to be for these AI stocks when 3 months after they launch they have to start making earnings calls and showing their financials. That quarter-by-…

> I'm bullish on AI

I started as being very skeptical circa 2024, became more open minded towards the end of 2025, and am becoming skeptical again now. Reason being, I interact with entrepreneurs now and I see what they hope for in AI. The universal desire seems to be "people will just talk to AI instead of me while paying me the same as before or more". This is typically covered with coping mechanisms (e.g. "I am not building a chat bot, I am building..." after which they describe a chat bot).

I think the crash is getting more likely because the disconnect between what the technology can be used for does not match what people want it to do.

Re: Anthropic confidentially submits draft S-1 to the SEC

#367

Post by bparsons »

bsder wrote: post #344
radicalbyte wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google was easily 10x better than any of their competition. It was effectively alone in the market. Most of us were using 56k modems to access the internet back then, Google's search returned results within a couple of seconds. Yahoo, Lycos, Excite, Alta-Vista were still loading. Then the search results themselves were so good you could often just pick the first result. They eventually added a button which just took…

> Alta-Vista were still loading Your memory is faulty. AltaVista was always super fast--it never had the advertising bloat that the other ones had until the very end. The problem AltaVista had was that it didn't scale when the Internet went exponential--so AltaVista would give you good search results until you asked current, topical questions. AltaVista relied on running a single, super-expensive stonking huge Alpha…

Webcrawler was faster than both!

Re: Anthropic confidentially submits draft S-1 to the SEC

#368

Post by benl »

xracy wrote: post #348

Curious how someone with a 401k, who didn't want their retirement to be used by these companies to buy at an inflated price, would go about opting out of this. Typically I just have my 401k in an index fund so that things have to become established before they're added. This seems like it's circumventing that, and I would be inclined to vote with my wallet. But everything around 401k index funds that I see are very o…

Technically I think this would be fairly straightforward. You could keep the index fund and then short the stock you believe is overvalued, to the degree it's weighted in the index fund. That would give you stock market exposure equivalent to the index without the company you don't believe in.

But I would strongly advise you to NOT DO THIS.

The above position makes it explicit that your thesis involves shorting a stock that could go through the roof in value. That emphasizes what a risk you're taking with your thesis. If your typical investment approach is to just buy index funds, then carry on just buying index funds and let the market do its work.

By the way, if SpaceX, Anthropic, OpenAI etc were to be excluded from the indices, then professional investors would just start a trade the inverse of the one I outlined above - i.e. they'd start shorting your index fund to the extent it was underweight in those companies, in order to profit off the exclusion of those tickers from it.

If you're in this for the long term (which I assume you are given this is your 401k), don't try to second-guess the market short-term.

Re: Anthropic confidentially submits draft S-1 to the SEC

#369

Post by derwiki »

anukin wrote: post #198
pseudosavant wrote: post #197

Up until this point, the potential for an AI bust blast radius was limited to corporate investors, but this is going to cause regular retail/401k investors to get exposure, which could have far bigger impacts on a downturn. Not to mention the insane wake-up call it is going to be for these AI stocks when 3 months after they launch they have to start making earnings calls and showing their financials. That quarter-by-…

I thought you could intelligently allocate 401k. I don’t think mine was etfs of nasdaq or s&p for some time now. Ever since Tesla got in

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