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Anthropic raises $30B in Series G funding at $380B post-money valuation

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Re: Anthropic raises $30B in Series G funding at $380B post-money valuation

#391

Post by randerson »

hamandcheese wrote: post #358
randerson wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SpaceX can also raise their prices for government launches to pretty much anything and still get business, because they are essentially a monopoly.

So why haven't they already?

I can think of a many possible reasons offhand:

1. They've been in Growth mode, where it's common for companies to prioritize capturing the market over being profitable.

2. They've had no problems with money since proving their effectiveness. They can raise capital at favorable valuations (and hold secondary sales) whenever they want. It has been one of the hottest private stocks that people clamor to own.

3. As a private company whose dominant shareholder is the CEO, nobody can pressure them to raise prices. This typically changes after an IPO.

4. Previous government administrations would likely have resisted paying them much more than they charge the private sector or other governments. The new administration has proven they will do favors for companies that are friendly to them.

5. For awhile it seemed they might soon have viable competition for manned space flight (e.g. Starliner) but only in 2024 did we see how bad those are.

6. The low cost is a point of pride for Musk who liked to prove how much more efficiently he could do spaceflight than NASA.

Re: Anthropic raises $30B in Series G funding at $380B post-money valuation

#392

Post by 2sdd »

xvector wrote: post #61
dude250711 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To maximise shareholder value.

They've been very clear about their mission, they're doing more than anyone else when it comes to it, and if you've ever interviewed with them you'd know how critical it is to them. But I guess it's easier to make a glib comment than look these things up.

Amazing people lap this up.

Re: Anthropic raises $30B in Series G funding at $380B post-money valuation

#393

Post by thmorriss »

TimTheTinker wrote: post #273
mcny wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I very much wanted Google Plus to succeed. Circles was a great idea in my opinion. Google Plus profiles could be the personal home page for the rest of us but of course, Google being Google... That being said, tying bonuses for the whole company on the success of Google+ was too much even for me.

I very much wanted Google Wave to succeed. It seemed like a really cool way to communicate. I guess we sort of got it with Slack though

i was obsessed with google wave... so cool

Re: Anthropic raises $30B in Series G funding at $380B post-money valuation

#394

Post by efficax »

kccqzy wrote: post #165
criddell wrote: post #134

I wonder how good it is for companies to be allowed to grow so big and still be private? Would it makes sense to require any company with more than a billion dollar valuation to be subject to all the same SEC requirements that public companies are? Could companies be blocked from raising money once the reach a crazy valuation like $1 billion?

That doesn’t make sense at all. The raison d’être of SEC is to protect regular mom-and-pop investors. A private company just doesn’t allow anyone to invest in them. Why should SEC rules apply? On what legal basis can you force a private company to divulge its financial details? Would you be happy if you, as an individual, have to divulge your account statements if your own net wealth reaches one million?

SEC rules apply to private investment for the same reason they do to public investment: the world is full of scammers. In any case, you usually can't invest in a private company without being a "qualified" investor (already rich)

Re: Anthropic raises $30B in Series G funding at $380B post-money valuation

#395

Post by 2sdd »

unmole wrote: post #314
QuantumGood wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hard to bet against Hassabis + Google's resources. This is in their wheelhouse, and it's eating their search business and refactoring their cloud business. G+ seemed like a way to get more people to Google for login and tracking.

> it's eating their search business Fact not in evidence. Google's search and advertising revenue continues to grow.

Thats pretty telling that on the search's / ad placement on the web where it matters, OAI has had no impact or its muted and offset by continued market power / increased demand for Google's ad-space on the web.

Re: Anthropic raises $30B in Series G funding at $380B post-money valuation

#396

Post by efficax »

zaphirplane wrote: post #374

How will these investors get their money. The AI companies either have a competitor invent AGI which means all other AI companies are worth nothing or they themselves invent AGI in which case a whole bunch of companies go broke including the investors themselves. This money isn’t never going to be returned

A few of these, likely openai and anthropic, will IPO, and the early stage investors will get their cash back then. Others will crash, maybe also openai and anthropic. Other investors in smaller firms may get cash back when the companies are swallowed up by Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, Apple, etc., when the Great and Inevitable Consolidation occurs. I think short term there's a ton of money to be made by investing in these companies. In the long run I don't see how they survive, since nobody in the big leagues has a real technological advantage over anybody else so stiff competition will keep prices low. Even if they cartelize, a startup could beat them on price since there's not much preventing anyone with enough capital from building their own "frontier" models now, except GPU shortages... Talent of course, but there's plenty of smart people out there who would take a big paycheck to do it.

Re: Anthropic raises $30B in Series G funding at $380B post-money valuation

#398

Post by arw0n »

asdff wrote: post #352
marcus_holmes wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think they've been gaming benchmarks. I use Claude every day. I cannot get Gemini to do anything useful, at all. Every time I've tried to use it, it has just failed to do what was required.

Three subthreads up you have someone saying gemini did what claude couldn't for them on some 14 year old legacy code issue. Seems you can't really use peoples prior success with their problem as an estimate of what your success will be like with your problem and a tool.

People and benchmarks are using pretty specific, narrow tests to judge the quality of LLMs. People have biases, benchmarks get gamed. In my own experience, Gemini seems to be lazy and scatter-brained compared to Claude, but shows higher general-purpose reasoning abilities. Anthropic is also obviously massively focusing on making their models good at coding.

So it is reasonable that Claude might show significantly better coding ability for most tasks, but the better general reasoning ability proves useful in coding tasks that are complicated and obscure.

Re: Anthropic raises $30B in Series G funding at $380B post-money valuation

#399

Post by cortesoft »

asdff wrote: post #353
cortesoft wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook was the same way when it started.

It was a little different. Facebook was eventually (after harvard only) wide open for college email holders so it wasn't some exclusive club that kept people you want to be in their out. It kept your parents out though and your lame younger sibling. You could immediately use it with your friends. No invite nonsense like with g+.

There was an in between time when they added a limited set of other colleges, too.

Re: Anthropic raises $30B in Series G funding at $380B post-money valuation

#400

Post by Sparyjerry »

reenorap wrote: post #51

How is Anthropic, OpenAI and xAi going to compete against the likes of Google that can spend $200 billion a year? It’s an impossible war and all these investors are throwing their money into a bottomless insatiable pit of money. Until the funding stops for one reason or another and then everyone loses all their money at once like a star that collapses into a black hole singularity in a femtosecond.

Google has been working on these exact same type of models far longer than all of the new entrants but was unable to make them good enough or useful enough. Money spent does not equate to value created or we would have one big company that runs everything.
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