Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Anthropic Is Preparing for IPO and We Should Be Worried

vincentschmalbach.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 105 posts

Re: Anthropic Is Preparing for IPO and We Should Be Worried

#51

Post by Forgeties79 »

vincent_s wrote: post #11
Forgeties79 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it also doesn’t help that they’re all different flavors of the same tool and it’s very easy to jump between them. None of them actually made a particularly distinct product, and they want us to use their tool to make/justify the nebulous billion dollar product. As for subscription/token costs, even with increases they’re not even remotely covering costs. If people actually paid what it cost for these companie…

Yeah I'm worried about that too. Current SOTA models might just be too expensive for most use cases if we had to pay the real costs.

I wonder if there's a bit of a standoff situation here where every company feels like they have to burn enormous amounts of cash training/iterating on their models because if they stop, they'll get leapfrogged too quickly. So unless they all agree to just settle where they are more or less and focus on building out functionality and tooling, they all have to keep spending at an unsustainable rate.

Re: Anthropic Is Preparing for IPO and We Should Be Worried

#52

Post by ReptileMan »

cmiles8 wrote: post #3

It’s going to be an interesting period ahead. The market is going to struggle to absorb SpaceX, OpenAI, Anthropic and others. They’re just massive relative to typical IPOs. Maybe one can sneak through but not all. Someone is going to have to have a very bad day and it’s not clear who yet. Separately there’s a big battle to keep these folks out of the S&P index, because many funds (some of whom are required to buy ind…

I think that SpaceX and OpenAI will be ok. Ukraine war showed that Starlink is the real deal - all of Ukraine's successes (or reversed losses) in the last few months are mostly due to Starlink cutting off Russia.

OpenAI seem to have the tech on par with Anthropic and world class con artist at the top and access to more compute. So when the tsunami of Chinese models and silicone materializes - Anthropic will be most vulnerable.

Re: Anthropic Is Preparing for IPO and We Should Be Worried

#53

Post by eigencoder »

miroljub wrote: post #24
afavour wrote: post #12

I hope price increases will mean we see serious moves towards open source and/or on device models. Feels like that's where we should all be headed but the current subsidy is a distraction.

There is no subsidy in interference. Serving existing models is a highly profitable business. The proofs are many independent companies serving models for profit. What is expensive is model development and training, but again, that's nothing inherent to technology. It's just that Anthropic and other western vendors made a business decision to use cheap investors money to brute force a new model development and market…

As I understand it, those cost optimizations relied on someone else brute forcing new model development. If everyone was trying to do it cheaper, we wouldn't have the models we have today.

Re: Anthropic Is Preparing for IPO and We Should Be Worried

#54

Post by throwaway132448 »

HWR_14 wrote: post #31
afavour wrote: post #12

I hope price increases will mean we see serious moves towards open source and/or on device models. Feels like that's where we should all be headed but the current subsidy is a distraction.

I would self-host if it didn't cost so much for the hardware. But right now that's cost prohibitive for most individuals and small or medium businesses.

Funny how that happened, isn’t it?

Re: Anthropic Is Preparing for IPO and We Should Be Worried

#55

Post by cmiles8 »

twiceaday wrote: post #47
the__alchemist wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regarding S&P: That is my acute concern. For individual investors, they can be removed by taking an a short position corresponding to the stock's index weight. (I do this for TSLA). More broadly, it exposes people who only use index funds or don't have shorting in their tool box (passive investors for example) to big risk.

Tesla is currently 2.2% of S&P 500. If it halves, losing $800,000,000,000 usd market cap, the index will go down by 1.1%. What big risk?

1.1% is about 15% of the typical returns for a year in the S&P500, from a single stock. Folks and funds invest here for diversity precisely to limit such impacts.

It’s a big risk and that’s why there’s a big fuss right now to keep these guys out of the index.

Re: Anthropic Is Preparing for IPO and We Should Be Worried

#56

Post by re-thc »

dgellow wrote: post #43
re-thc wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. Google has SpaceX stock. To make matters worse all the banks, insurers and investment firms in that S&P list are likely in there somewhere too. I'm sure I'm missing a whole lot more.

Indirect exposure is just a completely different beast than direct exposure. It’s a different level of risk altogether

> It’s a different level of risk altogether

In this case, really? Between Nvidia, Microsoft, AMD, Amazon and everyone else in that S&P 500 there's not >50% of OpenAI already? It's not that indirect.

Microsoft alone is 27%.

Re: Anthropic Is Preparing for IPO and We Should Be Worried

#57

Post by ReptileMan »

bilsbie wrote: post #50

GOOD POINT by my wife: it’s too early in the AI cycle to already have winners especially with sky high valuations. It’s like betting on ibm to win the pc race.

It took tremendous effort by IBM to lose the PC race. They succeeded eventually - but it took some tries to get there.

Re: Anthropic Is Preparing for IPO and We Should Be Worried

#58

Post by CharlieDigital »

999900000999 wrote: post #49
CharlieDigital wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple has the edge here since they fully control the hardware and can baseline their implementation. It feels like Microsoft's task is much harder because there's a much broader range of hardware and capabilities that they need to support.

Microsoft sells hardware. Surface laptops. Microsoft has spent a lot of time telling people to buy AI ready PCs. I just don't think it's in their business model to offer on device LLM. They want you to subscribe to Copilot. Which encapsulates the entire enshitication of Windows. Microsoft demands more money. Subscribe to gamepass, subscribe to OneDrive!

I'm aware of the Surface line, but 1) they don't own the hardware stack nearly to the same degree as Apple does, 2) it makes up only a small slice of the ecosystem and is a more premium product as far as PCs go. Windows ecosystem has far more variance in terms of CPU + GPU capabilities.

I can see Microsoft pushing the subscription angle, but I do think there is a place for on-device capabilities since those will always be more responsive for small tasks.

Re: Anthropic Is Preparing for IPO and We Should Be Worried

#59

Post by WarmWash »

spiderfarmer wrote: post #23
WarmWash wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The market is going to struggle to absorb It's very unlikely, part of the reason why valuations are so high is because there is so much money, not just in the US, but globally, that is desperately seeking a place to park.

See why it doesn’t trickle down?

It is trickled down money.

Liquid cash looking for a home is overwhelmingly white/blue collar retirement money. Billionaire money is almost always a totally undiversified portfolio of their own company. There are billions of people globally who save money and want it to grow, so they hand it over weekly to institutions that do asset management. It's these institutions that are seeking new investments, but the money isn't their own, it's largely everyday people's savings.

Re: Anthropic Is Preparing for IPO and We Should Be Worried

#60

Post by cmiles8 »

twalla wrote: post #19
cmiles8 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

? No. These companies are not publicly traded yet so they are not in these indices. Funds are fighting to keep them out so they’re not required to buy stocks they think will tank.

There is indirect exposure to Anthropic/OpenAI through all the incestuous partnerships between hyperscalers and NVDA

True, but that’s tiny relative to these companies going public themselves. Totally different ballgames
Post reply on HN