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Anthropic raises $13B Series F

anthropic.com

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Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F

#421

Post by jstoppa »

pembrook wrote: post #162
usrnm wrote: post #9

I feel like the money itself makes less and less sense these days. It's just numbers that are becoming increasingly detached from the real world

Before you pat yourself on the back for being so smart and grounded... Remember, every technology you use today followed this pattern, with winners emerging that absolutely did go on to be extremely profitable for decades. Most of us remember the .com era. But in the early 1900s there was literally hundreds of automotive startups (actual car companies, and tens of thousands of supplier startups) in the metro-detroit…

I agree, just another cycle

Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F

#422

Post by utyop22 »

1oooqooq wrote: post #185
ankit219 wrote: post #41

Their projections for ARR at the end of this year at a high of $9B[1] at the end of this year. And reported gross margins of 60% (-30% with cloud providers partnerships). All things considered, if this pans out, it's a 20x multiple. High yes, but not that crazy. Specially considering their growth rate and that too at a decent margin at gm level. [1]: It was $3B at the end of May (so likely $250M in May alone), and $5…

exactly. what are people who make these investments even betting on? it certainly is not revenue or dividends. so it can only be a bet the stock will go up faster than other less risky stocks. and we continue to pretend that market generates any semblance of value.

But if you're an investor who doesn't care about the long-term value of the firm, all you care about is maximizing your return on future sales of the shares of stock.

Doing proper intrinsic valuation with technology firms is nigh-on impossible to do.

Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F

#423

Post by pnt12 »

xpe wrote: post #222

Remember the YouTube acquisition? Many probably don’t since it was 2006. $1.65B. To many, it seemed bonkers. Narrow point: In general, one person’s impression of what is crazy does not fare well against market-generated information. Broader point: If you think you know more than the market, all other things equal, you’re probably wrong. Lesson: Only searching for reasons why you are right is a fishing expedition. If…

I mean, this sounds like survivor bias in action?

Google also bought Motorola for 12 billion and Microsoft bought Nokia for 7 billion. Those weren't success cases.

Or more similarly, WeWork got 12B from investor and isn't doing well (hell, bankrupt, according to Wikipedia).

Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F

#424

Post by utyop22 »

matt3D wrote: post #279
d_burfoot wrote: post #220

There's a big issue with a lot of thinking about these valuations, which is that LLM inference does not need the 5-nines of uptime guarantees that cloud datacenters provide. You are going to see small business investors around the world pursue the following model: - Buy an old warehouse and a bunch of GPUs - Hire your local tech dude to set up the machines and install some open-source LLMs - Connect your machines to…

I use OpenAI's batch mode for about 80% of my AI work at the moment, and one of the upsides is it reduces the frantic side of my AI work. When the response is immediate I feel like I can't catch a break. I think once the sheen of Microsoft Copilot and the like wear off and people realise LLMs are really good at creating deterministic tools but not very good at being one, not only will the volume of LLM usage decline,…

Yeah these things take time to play out. So I always just say, the large populous of people will finally realise fantasy and reality have to converge at some point.

Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F

#425

Post by worldsayshi »

criemen wrote: post #394
code4tee wrote: post #65

Impressive round but it seems unlikely this game can go on much longer before something implodes. Given the amount of cash you need to set of fire to stay relevant it’s becoming nearly impossible for all but a few players to stay competitive, but those players have yet to demonstrate a viable business model. With all these models converging, the big players aren’t demonstrating a real technical innovation moat. Every…

I'm not so confident in that yet. If you look at the inference prices Anthropic charges (on the API) it's not a race to the bottom - they are asking for what I feel is a lot of money - yet people keep paying that.

Yeah, a collapse should only mean that training larger models become non viable right? Selling inference alone should still deliver profit.

Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F

#426

Post by Barbing »

bcrosby95 wrote: post #291
dom96 wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if I give you $15B, you will probably make a lot more than $15B with it "probably" is the key word here, this feels like a ponzi scheme to me. What happens when the next model isn't a big enough jump over the last one to repay the investment? It seems like this already happened with GPT-5. They've hit a wall, so how can they be confident enough to invest ever more money into this?

I think you're really bending over backwards to make this company seem non viable. If model training has truly turned out to be profitable at the end of each cycle, then this company is going to make money hand over fist, and investing money to out compete the competition is the right thing to do. Most mega corps started out wildly unprofitable due to investing into the core business... until they aren't. It's almost…

Thoughts on Ed Zitron’s pessimism?

“There Is No AI Revolution” - Feb ‘25:

https://www.wheresyoured.at/wheres-the-money/

Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F

#427

Post by axus »

jononor wrote: post #160
dcchambers wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And unfortunately, the amount of money being thrown around means that when the bottom falls out and its revealed that the emperor has no clothes, the implosion is going to impact all of us. It's going to rock the market like we've never seen before.

Hope it stays long enough to build up serious electricity generation, storage and distribution. Cause that has a lot of productive uses, and has historically been underdeveloped (in favor of fossile fuels). Though there will likely be a squeeze before we get there...

The electricians in data center country report they are earning a lot of money.

Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F

#428

Post by kaashif »

Davidzheng wrote: post #306
bradley13 wrote: post #201

Throwing money and compute at AI strikes me as a very short-term solution. In the end, the human brain does not run off a nuclear power plant, not even when we are learning. I expect the next breakthroughs to be all about efficiency. Granted, that could be tomorrow, or in 5 years, and the AI companies have to stay all at in the meantime.

the human brain can't run off a nuclear power plant b/c it was too hard for evolution to figure out, but we figured it out. No reason running on nuclear power plant won't give much higher intelligence.

But if we could drink a bottle of oil and become 10x smarter for 1 hour, it would be really cool. There just wasn't any use for that in the savannah, or indeed many bottles of oil.

Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F

#429

Post by JohnMakin »

dpe82 wrote: post #331
AlexandrB wrote: post #309

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…

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…

Should probably change this to "was appearance of incredible pace of compute growth due to Moore's Law," because even my basic CS classes from 15 years ago were teaching that it was drastically slowing down, and isn't really a "law" more than an observational trend that lasted a few decades. There are limits to how small you can make transistors and we're not too far from it, at least not what would continue to yield the results of that curve.
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