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Anthropic raises $13B Series F

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501–510 of 661 posts

Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F

#501

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…

Until one day an outsider finds a new approach for LLMs that vastly reduces the computational complexity.

And then we’ll realize we wasted an entire Apollo space program to build an over-complicated autocompleter.

Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F

#502
post #466

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1 million gallons is approximately 0.5 seconds of flow of the Columbia river.

It means nothing when most water is recycled anyways. It's not like the GPUs actually drink the stuff, the water just connects to heatsinks and is cycled around.

That's true for closed loop systems, but some data enters use evaporative cooling because it is more energy efficient.

Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F

#503
post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Intel was king of the hill until 2018.

“Bobby, some things are like a tire fire: trying to put it out only makes it worse. You just gotta grab a beer and let it burn.”

– Hank Rutherford Hill

Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F

#504

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…

Cloud is just “rent to own” without the “own” part.

Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F

#505

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> what are people who make these investments even betting on? They they achieve AGI or a close approximation, and end up wealthier than god. That's basically the bet here. Invest in OpenAI and Anthropic, and hope one of them reached near AGI.

hahahhahahahahahahahahhaha... oh wait, you're serious?

Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F

#506

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"This is a technology that could replace a sizable fraction of humamkind as a labor input." And if it does? What happens when a sizable fraction of humamkind is hungry and can't find work? It usually doesn't turn out so well for the rich.

I don't think most folks think very hard about where most wealth comes from but imagine it just sort of exists in a fixed quantity or is pulled from the ground like coal or diamonds - there's a fixed amount of it, and if there are very rich people, it must be because they took the coal/diamonds away from other people who need it. This leads to catchy slogans. But it's pretty obvious wealth can be created and destroye…

> The creation of wealth comes from trade, [...]

I'm not sure to what extent you meant this, but I don't know that I'd agree with it. Trade allows specialization which does increase wealth massively, no doubt. And because of how useful specialization is, all wealth creation involves trade somewhere. But specialization is just one component of wealth creation. It stands alongside labor, innovation, and probably others.

Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F

#507
post #377

This round started at $5bn target and it ends at $13bn. When this sort of thing happens it's normally because the company wants to 1) hit the "hot" market, and 2) has uncertainty about their ability to raise revenues at higher valuations in the future. Whatever it is, the signal it's sending of Anthropic insiders is negative for AI investors. Other comments having read a few hundred comments here: - there is so much…

I may agree if it was a 20% dilution round, but not if they are increasing from 3% to 7% dilution. Being so massively oversubscribed is a bullish sign, bad companies would be struggling to fill out their round.

your crystal ball needs calibration. this round alone was 14pct (183/13)... so the dillution was likely over 20pct.

Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F

#508
post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was convinced of this line of thinking for a while too but lately I'm not so sure. In software in particular, I think it's actually quite relevant what you can do in-house with a SOTA model (especially in the tool calling / fine tuning phase) that you just don't get with the same model via API. Think Cursor vs. Claude Code -- you can use the same model in Cursor, but the experience with CC is far and away better. I…

CC being better than Cursor didn't make sense to me until I realized Anthropic trains[0] it's models to use it's own built-in tools[1]. 0 - https://x.com/thisritchie/status/1944038132665454841 1- https://docs.anthropic.com/en/docs/agents-and-tools/tool-use...

It still doesn't make sense. Cursor undoubtedly has smart engineers who could implement the Anthropic text editing tool interface in their IDE. Why not just do that for one of your most important LLM integrations?

Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F

#509

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…

> GPT-7 will need its own sovereign wealth fund

If the diminishing returns that we see now continue to prove true, ChatGPT6 will already be financially not viable so I doubt there will be GPT7 that can live up to the big version bump.

Many folks already consider GPT5 to be more like GTP4.1. I personally am very bearish on Anthropic and OpenAI.

Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F

#510

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…

This is why Nvidia is the most valuable company in the world. Ultimately all these investment rounds for LLM companies are just going to be spent on Nvidia products.
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