Anthropic reportedly preparing for $300B IPO
vechron.com192 points by GeorgeWoff25 10 hours ago
192 points by GeorgeWoff25 10 hours ago
It's interesting that Amazon don't appear interested in acquiring Anthropic, which would have seemed like somewhat of a natural fit given that they are already partnered, Anthropic have apparently optimized (or at least adapted) for Trainium, and Amazon don't have their own frontier model.
It seems that Amazon are playing this much like Microsoft - seeing themselves are more of a cloud provider, happy to serve anyone's models, and perhaps only putting a moderate effort into building their own models (which they'll be happy to serve to those who want that capability/price point).
I don't see the pure "AI" plays like OpenAI and Anthropic able to survive as independent companies when they are competing against the likes of Google, and with Microsoft and Amazon happy to serve whatever future model comes along.
LOL of course they don't want to own Anthropic, else they themselves would be responsible for coming up with the $10s of billions in Monopoly money that Anthropic has committed to pay AMZN for compute in the next few years. Better to take an impressive looking stake and leave some other idiot holding the buck.
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Why would they buy Anthropic when they already have access to all the tech and source-code of Anthropic for free ?
Not only the models but also training data, model architecture, documentation, weights and latest R&D experiments ?
Take an instance -> Snapshot -> Investigate.
Unless they get caught it is not illegal.
GP is just commenting on the use of a mixed metaphor.
hell if passing the buck is the opposite of holding the bag then maybe we should mix em
maybe the full array of options is: pass the hot potato, hold the buck, or drop it like a bag.
Amazon also uses Claude under the hood for their "Rufus" shopping search assistant which is all over amazon.com.
It's kind of funny, you can ask Rufus for stuff like "write a hello world in python for me" and then it will do it and also recommend some python books.
> It's kind of funny, you can ask Rufus for stuff like "write a hello world in python for me" and then it will do it and also recommend some python books.
Interesting, I tried it with the chatbot widget on my city government's page, and it worked as well.
I wonder if someone has already made an openrouter-esque service that can connect claude code to this network of chat widgets. There are enough of them to spread your messages out over to cover an entire claude pro subscription easily.
A childhood internet friend of mine did something similar to that but for sending SMSes for free using the telco websites' built in SMS forms. He even had a website with how much he saved his users, at least until the telcos shut him down.
> It's kind of funny, you can ask Rufus for stuff like "write a hello world in python for me" and then it will do it and also recommend some python books.
From a perspective of "how do we monetize AI chatbots", an easy thing about this usage context is that the consumer is already expecting and wanting product recommendations.
(If you saw this behavior with ChatGPT, it wouldn't go down as well, until you were conditioned to expect it, and there were no alternatives.)
Are you sure? While Amazon doesn't own a "true" frontier model they have their own foundation model called Nova.
I assume if Amazon was using Claude's latest models to power it's AI tools, such as Alexa+ or Rufus, they would be much better than they currently are. I assume if their consumer facing AI is using Claude at all it would be a Sonnet or Haiku model from 1+ versions back simply due to cost.
After watching The Thinking Game documentary, maybe Amazon has little appetite for "research" companies that don't actually solve real world problems, like Deepseek did.
They're likely just waiting out the eventual crash and waiting to buy at the resulting fire sale. Microsoft has done a very good job of investing in the space enough to see a potentially lucrative pay out while managing the risk enough to not be sunk if it doesn't pan out.
Maybe Anthropic simply don’t want to be acquired
You understand that doing an IPO is quite literally selling big chunks of yourself to the highest bidder, right?
Sort of. You can do what Zuck did; give your shares more votes, so you stay in control. (He owns 13% of the shares, but more than 50% of the voting power.) That's less doable with an acquisition.
I too would be sitting back and watching my competitors commit insane capital to this unlikely bet.
Why are you assuming Anthropic is for sale? They have a clear path to profitability, booming growth, and a massive and mission driven founding team.
They could make more money keeping control of the company and have control.
> They have a clear path to profitability
I'd love to see evidence for such a thing, because it's not clear to me at all that this is the case.
I personally think they're the best of the model providers but not sure if any foundation model companies (pure play) have a path to profitability.
What do you mean by pure play? Claude code alone is 1B revenue. It's not just the API they make money on.
https://www.anthropic.com/news/anthropic-acquires-bun-as-cla...
But there's no moat around these models, they're all interchangeable and leapfrogging each other at a decent pace.
Gemini could get much better tomorrow and their entire customer base could switch without issue.
I think Claude Code is the moat (though I definitely recognize it's a pretty shallow moat). I don't want to switch to Codex or whatever the Gemini CLI is, I like Claude Code and I've gotten used to how it works.
Again, I know that's a shallow moat - agents just aren't that complex from a pure code perspective, and there are already tools that you can use to proxy Claude Code's requests out to different models. But at least in my own experience there is a definite stickiness to Claude that I probably won't bother to overcome if your model is 1.1x better. I pay for Google Business or whatever it's called primarily to maintain my vanity email and I get some level of Gemini usage for free, and I barely touch it, even though I'm hearing good things about it.
(If anything I'm convincing myself to give Gemini a closer look, but I don't think that undermines my overarching (though slightly soft) point).
And, if your revenue is $1B but your costs are $2B it only lasts until the music stops....
Which is not a lot at all compared to their cost and especially the valuation discussed here.
They are selling, to public equity investors, because they can get a better price that way than selling to another company!
Assuming by "they" you mean current shareholders (who include Google and Amazon and VCs) if they are selling at least in part, why would at least some of them not be willing to sell their entire stakes?
> They could make more money keeping control of the company and have control.
It depends on how much they can sell for.
why exit now and become a stuffed AI driven animal when you can keep running this ship yourself, doing your dream job and getting all the woos and panties?
Amazon and Microsoft are protecting themselves from the bubble.
Yes, repackaging and reselling AI is a starkly better business than creating frontier models
It is spending a lot of money to do the same thing (selling the shovels), and gaining maybe a bit bigger cut if the bubble doesn't burst too violently.
How would this work, given that Anthropic is a public benefit corporation?
That S1 is gonna make for a fun read. It'll make Adam Neumann blush.
Because of unprofitability? ARR and growth are very high, and margins are either good or can soon become good.
Is the claim that coding agents can't be profitable?
> margins are either good or can soon become good.
Their margins are negative and every increase in usage results in more cost. They have a whole leaderboard of people who pay $20 a month and then use $60,000 of compute.
> margins are either good or can soon become good
This is always the pitch for money-losing IPOs. Occasionally, it is true.
Dario Amodei gives of strong Adam Neumann vibes. He claimed "AI will replace 90% of developers within 6 months" about a year ago...
It was "writing 90% of the code", which seems to be pretty accurate, if not conservative, for those keeping up with the latest tools.
Yes, those using the tools use the tools, but I don't really see those developers absolutely outpacing the rest of developers who do it the old fashioned way still.
I think you're definitely right, for the moment. I've been forcing myself to use/learn the tools almost exclusively for the past 3-4 months and I was definitely not seeing any big wins early on, but improvement (of my skills and the tools) has been steady and positive, and right now I'd say I'm ahead of where I was the old-fashioned way, but on an uneven basis. Some things I'm probably still behind on, others I'm way ahead. My workflow is also evolving and my output is of higher quality (especially tests/docs). A year from now I'll be shocked if doing nearly anything without some kind of augmented tooling doesn't feel tremendously slow and/or low-quality.
it’s wild that engineers need months or years to properly learn programming languages but dismiss AI tooling after one bad interaction
And 12 months later Anthropic is listing 200 open positions for humans: https://www.anthropic.com/jobs
that’s not what he claimed, just to be clear. I’m too lazy to look up the full quote but not lazy enough to not comment this is A) out of context B) mis-phrased as to entirely misconstrue the already taken-out-of-context quote
I think it was also back in March, not a year ago
https://www.businessinsider.com/anthropic-ceo-ai-90-percent-... (March 2025):
>"I think we will be there in three to six months, where AI is writing 90% of the code. And then, in 12 months, we may be in a world where AI is writing essentially all of the code," Amodei said at a Council of Foreign Relations event on Monday.
>Amodei said software developers would still have a role to play in the near term. This is because humans will have to feed the AI models with design features and conditions, he said.
>"But on the other hand, I think that eventually all those little islands will get picked off by AI systems. And then, we will eventually reach the point where the AIs can do everything that humans can. And I think that will happen in every industry," Amodei said.
I think it's a silly and poorly defined claim.
you’re once again cutting the quote short — after “all of the code” he has more to say that’s very important for understanding the context and avoiding this rage-bait BS we all love to engage in
edit: sorry you mostly included it paraphrased; it does a disservice (I understand it’s largely the media’s fault) to cut that full quote short though. I’m trying to specifically address someone claiming this person said 90% of developers would be replaced in a year over a year ago, which is beyond misleading
edit to put the full quote higher:
> "and in 12 months, we might be in a world where the ai is writing essentially all of the code. But the programmer still needs to specify what are the conditions of what you're doing. What is the overall design decision. How we collaborate with other code that has been written. How do we have some common sense with whether this is a secure design or an insecure design. So as long as there are these small pieces that a programmer has to do, then I think human productivity will actually be enhanced"
can you post the full quote then? He has posted what the rest of us read
I believe:
> "and in 12 months, we might be in a world where the ai is writing essentially all of the code. But the programmer still needs to specify what are the conditions of what you're doing. What is the overall design decision. How we collaborate with other code that has been written. How do we have some common sense with whether this is a secure design or an insecure design. So as long as there are these small pieces that a programmer has to do, then I think human productivity will actually be enhanced"
from https://www.youtube.com/live/esCSpbDPJik?si=kYt9oSD5bZxNE-Mn
(sorry have been responding quickly on my phone between things; misquotes like this annoy the fuck out of me)
Honestly these IPOs are likely to kill the market. Once the necessary disclosures are out, and the worse-case math people are assuming turns out to have been way more optimistic than the actual truth, the entire market is likely crashing since the money is so spread out. So far there has been zero good news from an investment perspective out of LLM centered companies outside of what are ultimately just complex financial engineered investments.
If they get into the S&P 500 at a $300B market cap that puts them at #30, just behind Coca-Cola. They'll make up about half a percent of the index and then will have a ready supply of price-insensitive buyers in the form of everybody who puts their retirement fund into an index fund on autopilot.
Well they'll hit the requirements for company size and country of domicile, but aren't yet at the other requirements, of profitability and a minimum of 12 months after an IPO so they have a chance of being added.
As to the size of the bump they'll get there isn't a single rule of thumb but larger cap companies tend to get a smaller bump, which you'd expect. I've seen models estimate a 2-5% bump for large companies and a 4-7% bump for mid level and 6-12% for "small" under $20 Billion dollar market cap companies.
SP500 is a capitalization* weighted index, hence it is very price sensitive.
Everybody who puts their retirement fund into an index fund are buying the index fund without relation to the index fund's price (aka price insensitive). But the index fund itself is buying shares based on each company's relative performance, hence the index fund is price sensitive. That is evidenced by companies falling out of the SP500 and even failing.
*specifically float-adjusted market capitalization
https://www.spglobal.com/spdji/en/documents/index-policies/m...
>The goal of float adjustment is to adjust each company’s total shares outstanding for long-term, strategic shareholders, whose holdings are not considered to be available to the market.
see also:
https://www.spglobal.com/spdji/en/methodology/article/sp-us-...
The S&P 500 is inversely price sensitive, as a capitalization-weighted index. Normally you want to buy low and sell high. An S&P500 index fund buys more of high-priced stocks and sells the low-priced ones, by definition. The highest market caps are the stocks with the highest prices (adjusted for number of shares outstanding, of course).
For most ordinary investors, this doesn't really matter, because you put your money into your retirement fund every month and you only take it out at retirement. But if you're looking at the short term, it absolutely matters. I've heard S&P 500 indexing referred to as a momentum investment strategy: it buys stocks whose prices are going up, on the theory that they will go up more in the future. And there's an element of a self-fulfilling prophecy to that, since if everybody else is investing in the index fund, they also will be buying those same stocks, which will cause them to go up even more in the future.
If you want something that buys shares based on each company's relative performance, you want a fundamental-weighted index. I've looked into that and I found a few revenue-weighted index funds, but couldn't find a single earnings-weighted index fund, which is what I actually want. Recommendations wanted; IMHO the S&P 500 is way overvalued on fundamentals and heavily exposed to certain fairly bubbly stocks (the Mag-7 alone make up 35% of your index fund, and one of them is my employer, and all of them employ heavily in my geographic area and are pushing up my home value), so I've been looking for a way to diversify into companies that actually have solid earnings.
>inversely price sensitive
This isn't a term used in economics. The typical terms used are positive price sensitivity and negative price sensitivity.
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/price-sensitivity.asp
While it is true that being added to the SP500 can lead to an increase in demand, and hence cause the index fund to pay more for the share, there are evidently opposing forces that modulate share prices for companies in the SP500.
>I've been looking for a way to diversify into companies that actually have solid earnings.
No one has more solid earnings than the top tech companies. Assuming you don't work for Tesla, you already are doing about the best you can in the US. Your options to diversify is to invest in other countries, develop your political connections, and possibly get into real estate development. Maybe have a bunch of kids.
I love claude, but looking at google it seems like it will just be a matter of time before Google/Gemini will be a better product. Just looking at how much Google have improved their AI game the last couple months. I'm putting my money on google, I assume the reason they are doing an IPO right now is to be able to cash in on the investment before google surpasses them.
It's a hot take, I know :D
Opus 4.5 is good. At least in Cursor it’s much better than Gemini 3 Pro for writing a lot of code autonomously: faster and calls tools better.
That said Gemini is still very, very good at reviews, SQL, design and smaller (relatively) edits; but today it is not at all obvious that Google is going to win it all. They’re positioned very well, but execution needs to be top notch.
Have you tried Opus 4.5?
It's an absolute workhorse.
It is so proactive in fixing blockers - 90% of the time for me, choosing the right path forward.
I was thinking this is going to happen because last night I got an email about them fixing how they collect sales taxes. Having been part of a couple of IPO/acquisitions, I thought to myself: "Nobody cares about sales taxes until they need to IPO or sell."
So would a $300B Anthropic get included in the SP500?
I think there are profitability requirements, right?
Profitability in both 3 month and 12 month spans. Also minimum 12 months of trading history after IPO.
See page ~9 of https://www.spglobal.com/spdji/en/documents/methodologies/me...
I guess (hope) this means they don’t see a bailout happening soon enough
Amodei is at the NYT Dealbook Summit today at 1:40 Eastern
It could be smart for them to get in now with so much talk of a bubble or potential stock market correction.
"Be first, be smarter, or cheat" well. Being first might really be the best game theory move if the collapse will start from you.
But they aren't the first. Google is the first frontier model lab to go public.
Retail investors yoloing into AI at peak bubble vibes sounds about right
Just how much of the market do retail investors control? I thought they were a drop in the bucket.
Also, is there a way to know how much of the total volume of shares is being traded now? If I kept hyping my company (successfully), and drove the share price from $10 to $1000, thanks to retail hype, I could 100x the value of my company lets say from $100m to $10B, while the amount of money actually changing hands would be miniscule in comparison.
When you add in money managed on behalf of retail investors it gets big fast, thinking indexed funds, pensions etc. they are not immune, and ETFs by definition need to participate
Is that not considered institutional? If i own a Vanguard ETF, the stock that comprises the ETF is classified as being owned by Vanguard, right?
Genuinely asking.
You are correct in the main thing you were trying to communicate, but I'll just correct this part:
> ETFs by definition need to participate
You meant to say "index funds". There are many different kinds of ETFs.
Retail has gotten alot bigger lately( last 10 years and mostly since covid) and alot more "organized".
Goldman puts out their retail reports weekly that show retail is 20% of trading in alot of names and higher in alot of the meme stock names.
They used to be so tiny due to $50/trade fees, but with the advent of all the free money in the system since covid and GenZ feeling like real estate won't be their path to freedom, and option trading for retail, and zero commission trading retail has a real voice in the markets.
Retail is a big deal these days. Used to be sub 10%, now it’s in the 30-40% of daily volume range IIUC.
You can easily look up the numbers you are asking for, the TLDR is that the volume in most stocks is high enough that you can’t manipulate it much. If it’s even 2x overpriced then there’s 100m on the table for whoever spots this and shorts, ie enough money that plenty of smart people will be spending effort on modeling and valuation studies.
>Retail is a big deal these days. Used to be sub 10%, now it’s in the 30-40% of daily volume range IIUC.
This isn't going to end well is it.
This is the real note - if the company was truly valuable, they wouldn't IPO, they'd get slurped up by someone big.
Modern IPOs are mainly dumping on retail and index investors.
Index investors aren't exposed to IPOs, since the common indexes (SPX etc) don't include IPOs (and if you invest in a YOLO index that does, that's on you).
Also:
> The US led a sharp rebound, driven by a surge in IPO filings and strong post-listing returns following the Federal Reserve’s rate cut.
VTI and VT, two of the largest index funds, DO invest in unprofitable companies.
And for the rest (SP 500 etc), these companies are going to fake profits using some sort of financial engineering to be included.
This isn't really true. IPOs provide access to much more money in a very short time frame. They also allow parties involved to make huge coin before, during and immediately after the process.
> In a statement, an Anthropic spokesperson said: “We have not made any decisions about when, or even whether, to go public.”
They are going public.
Anthropic is burning roughly $1B a quarter right now, has no clear path to profitability, and is still riding on the same “we’re the safe AI” narrative that’s starting to wear thin as everyone else catches up on safety tooling. Their revenue run-rate is reportedly in the low single-digit billions at best, which would put them at a price-to-sales multiple of 50–100× if they actually hit that valuation. For context, OpenAI at its last round was “only” ~80B on similar (or higher) revenue expectations. The moat feels increasingly shaky too. Claude is great, but the gap to GPT-4o, Gemini 2, and the open-source frontier is shrinking fast, and they’re still heavily dependent on AWS credits rather than owning their own infra like Google or Meta. At $300B they’d be priced for perfection in a world where perfection doesn’t exist yet. I’d be shocked if it actually prices anywhere near that. Curious what others think.
> reportedly in the low single-digit billions at best
They are expected to hit 9 billion by end of year. Meaning the valuation multiple is only 30x. Which is still steep but at that growth rate not totally unreasonable.
https://techcrunch.com/2025/11/04/anthropic-expects-b2b-dema...
30 for a company that doesn't pay anything and may never pay off at all is crazy in my book, so as a best case scenario it's an obvious hard pass.
The optimistic view is that Anthropic is one of about four labs in the world capable of generating truly state-of-the-art models. Also, Claude Code is arguably the best tool in its category at the moment. They have the developer market locked in.
The problem as I see it is that neither of those things are significant moats. Both OpenAI and Google have far better branding and a much larger user base, and Google also has far lower costs due to TPUs. Claude Code is neat but in the long run will definitely be replicated.
The missing piece here is Anthropic is not playing the same game. Consumer branding and larger user base are concerns for OpenAI vs Google. Personal chatbot/companion/ search isn’t their focus.
Anthropic is going for the enterprise and for developers. They have scooped up more of the enterprise API market than either Google or OpenAI, and almost half the developer market. Those big, long contracts and integration into developer workflows can end up as pretty strong moats.
> Claude Code is arguably the best tool in its category at the moment. They have the developer market locked in.
I am old enough (> 1 year old) to remember when Cursor had won the developer market from the previous winner copilot.
Google or Apple should have locked down Anthropic.
> Cursor had won the developer market from the previous winner copilot
It’s a fair point, but the counter-point is that back then these tools were ide plugins you could code up in a weekend. Ie closer to a consumer app.
Now Claude Code is a somewhat mature enterprise platform with plenty of integrations that you’d need to chase too. And long-term enterprise sales contracts you’d need to sell into. Ie much more like an enterprise SAAS play.
I don’t want to push this argument too far as I think their actual competitors (eg Google) could crank out the work required in 6-12 months if they decided to move in that direction, but it does protect them from some of the frothy VC-funded upstarts that simply can’t structurally compete in multi-year enterprise SAAS.
I'm not sure what is the advantage of Cursor ? It's just a VS Code plugin that sends queries to LLMs, why is it valued so much ? It's quite basic.
Is there some sort of unlimited plan that people take advantage of ?
It works well, and had first mover advantage. It also is a fork of VSCode, not just an extension/plugin.
If they had, they would have killed it.
Google should be stomping everyone else but it's ad addiction in search will hold it back. Innovators dilemma...
> They have the developer market locked in
Developers will jump ship to a better tool at a blink of an eye. I wouldn't call it locked in at all. In fact, people do use Claude Code and Codex simultaneously in some cases.
Individual and startup devs yes. Enterprise devs, less so.
The latter are locked in to whatever vendor(s) their corporate entity has subscribed to. In a perverse twist, this gives the approved[tm] vendors an incentive to add backend integrations to multiple different providers so that their actual end-users can - at least in theory - choose which models to use for their work.
Most of the secret sauce of Claude Code is visible to the world anyway, in the form of the minified JavaScript bundle they send. If you’re ever wondering about its inner workings you can simply ask it to deminify itself
> The optimistic view is that Anthropic is one of about four labs in the world capable of generating truly state-of-the-art models.
what about Chinese models?..
> They have the developer market locked in.
when has anything been 'locked in', someone comes with a better tool people will switch.
most of the secret sauce of Claude Code is visible to the world anyway, in the form of the minified JavaScript bundle they send. If you’re ever wondering about its inner workings you can simply ask it to deminify itself
> the gap to GPT-4o, Gemini 2 ... is shrinking fast
Are you ... aware that OpenAI and Google have launched more recent models?
almost every single AI doomer i listen to hasnt updated any of their priors in the last 2 years. these people are completely unaware of what is actually happening at the frontier or how much progress has been made.
That jumped out at me too. Like a time-traveling comment or something!
This is what happens when someone copies and pastes their old comment, note the other tells.
You haven’t actually looked at their fundamentals. They’re profitable serving current models including training costs and are only losing money on future RD training, but if you project future revenue growth on future generations of models you get a clear path to profitability.
They charge higher costs than OpenAI and have faster growing API demand. They have great margins compared to the rest of the industry on inference.
Sure the revenue growth could stop but it hasn’t and there is no reason to think it will.
> They’re profitable serving current models including training costs
I hear this a lot, do you have a good source (apart from their CEO saying it in an interview). I might have more faith in him but checks notes, it's late 2025 and AI is not writing all our code yet (amongst other mental things he's said).
The best I kind is this tech crunch article, which appears to be referencing an article from the information that is pay walled.
> The Information reports that Anthropic expects to generate as much as $70 billion in revenue and $17 billion in cash flow in 2028. The growth projections are fueled by rapid adoption of Anthropic’s business products, a person with knowledge of the company’s financials said.
> That said, the company expects its gross profit margin — which measures a company’s profitability after accounting for direct costs associated with producing goods and services — to reach 50% this year and 77% in 2028, up from negative 94% last year, per The Information.
https://techcrunch.com/2025/11/04/anthropic-expects-b2b-dema...
1. Sounds like exactly when early investors and insiders would want to cash in and when retail investors who “have heard of the company and like the product” will buy without a lot of financial analysis.
2. A 300bn IPO can mean actually raising n 300bn by selling 100% of the company. But it could also mean seeing 1% for 3bn right? Which seems like a trivial amount for the market to absorb no?
> A 300bn IPO ... raising 3bn
Would be so massively oversubscribed that it would become a $600bn company by the end of the day (which is a good tactic for future fund raising too).
I suspect if/when Anthropic does its next raise VCs will be buyers still not sellers.
is this comment created by AI? acc created in last 24 hours, lots of long ai-speak
Well, they have to. Every grift needs bagholders.
If they get to be a memestock, they might even keep the grift going for a good while. See Tesla as a good example of this.
interesting HN is so bearish considering most of them spend more on AI daily than any other saas category
Citation needed?
I spend $0 on AI. My employer spends on it for me, but I have no idea how much nor how it compares to vast array of other SaaS my employer provides for me.
While I anecdotally know of many devs who do pay out of pocket for relatively expensive LLM services, they a minority compared to folks like me happy to leach off of free or employer-provided services.
I’m very excited to hopefully find out from public filings just how many individuals pay for Claude vs businesses.
Let the enshitification of Claude commence!
Okay, let’s see you guys get passed the inference costs disclosure. According to WSJ it is enough to kill the frontier shop business model. It’s one of the biggest things blocking OpenAI
https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/big-techs-soaring-profits-have-a...
You did not parse that article properly. It regurgitates only what everyone else keeps saying: when you conflate R&D costs with operating costs, then you can say these companies are 'unprofitable'. I'd propose with a proper GAAP accounting they are profitable right now; by proper I mean that you amortize out the costs of R&D against the useful life of the models as best you can.
I am not aware of any frontier inference disclosures that put margins at less than 60%. Inference is profitable across the industry, full stop.
Historically R&D has been profitable for the frontier labs -- this is obscured because the emphasis on scaling the last five years has meant they just keep 10xing their R&D compute budget. But for each cycle of R&D, the results have returned more in inference margin than they cost in training compute. This is one major reason we keep seeing more spend on R&D - so far it has paid, in the form of helping a number of companies hit > $1bn in annual revenue faster than almost any companies in history have done so.
All that said, be cautious shorting these stocks when they go public.
Inference costs aren't a problem, selling inference is almost certainly profitable. The problem is that its (probably) not profitable enough to cover the training and other R&D costs.
Don't forget all the other costs of their business, like paying sales and solutions people (expensive, not going away any time soon).
Do you mean as part of going public they need to make public how much they spend on inference versus how much they make?
Yes to IPO you have to submit an S-1 form which requires the last 3 years of your full financials and much more. You can’t just IPO without disclosing how your business works and whether it makes or loses money and how much.
AGI will become IPO and everyone will forget and move on.
This seems contrary to their stated goal to prioritize AI safety.
It is against the law to prioritize AI safety if you run a public company. You must prioritize profits for your shareholders.
Unless you're a benefit corp, this is true for private companies as well. Quick q - which of the AI companies are benefit corps?
Yes, they will prioritize AI safety until their board of directors says that needs to change.
"We expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers."
-google cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin
then came the dot com bubble.
Do you think they currently exist to prioritize AI safety? That shit won’t pay the bills, will it? Then they don’t exist. Goals are nice, OKRs yay, but at the end of the day, we all know the dollar drives everything.
It's simple, they will redefine the term (just like OpenAI redefined "AGI" into "just makes a lot of money) into "doesn't leak user data" and then claim success
Does this mean that Anthropic has more than reached AGI, seeing as OpenAI has officially defined "AGI" as any AI that manages to create more than a hectocorn's worth (100 unicorns, or $100B) in economic value?
If they have reached AGI (whatever the definition), we should be prioritizing looking for signs of misanthropy.
That was $100B in profits, not valuation.
Profits over what timeframe? Valuation is just the total sum of profit discounted for time and risk.
defined ? You mean re-defined to turn it into goal that's achievable within reasonable timeframe
