11 ms·
AI is full of new and smaller companies. Both OpenAI and Anthropic are quite new, but growing fast.
by jonny_eh 1y ago
AI is full of new and smaller companies. Both OpenAI and Anthropic are quite new, but growing fast.
- israrkhan 1y agonew ok.. but smaller? that is not true.
- michaelt 1y agoAccording to Wikipedia, Google has 187,103 employees, Amazon has 1,556,000, and OpenAI has a mere 3,000 employees. So essentially a lifestyle business - but some people do think they have growth potential.
- israrkhan 1y agoIn terms of market cap OpenAI (500B valuation) is 5x smaller than Google.
- malfist 1y agoLeaving aside the pendatic "you can't be a multiple smaller than another object", 1/5 the valuation of the 5th most valuable company in the world is probably big enough to qualify you as a big company
- not_kurt_godel 1y ago> Leaving aside the pendatic "you can't be a multiple smaller than another object" Feel free to not leave this out, it's a pet peeve of mine. Thank you for the moment of catharsis.
- capyba 1y agoCan you explain this to me? Trying to understand but can’t haha.
- CoffeeOnWrite 1y agoGrandparent comment should have said "1/5th the size" instead of 5x smaller.
- pests 1y agoOddly we all knew what he meant. Huh.
- not_kurt_godel 1y agoHow small are you? How small are you multiplied by 5?
- rpcope1 1y agoMarket cap doesn't really feel like a good metric of anything other than what it would take to buy a company out. DuPont has a market cap of 30ish billion and 3M around 80B, and both are both larger and frankly more important than probably even Google.
- hollerith 1y agoYeah, the fact that $2.5 trillion of actual investor money chose Google (Alphabet) means very little: what really matters is the opinions of anonymous commenters on HN (especially opinions that start with "doesn't really feel like") People are so careful when writing anonymous HN comments and so careless in choosing where to invest their own money and the money of funds of which they are the professional manager
- Jensson 1y agoThat is a bet and not a metric of company size. Some people bet a lot on small companies, doesn't make them large.
- hollerith 1y agoInvestors look at how much money is already invested in a company in deciding whether to invest. I.e., investors pay close attention to market cap. If Google's market cap were $25 trillion, practically nobody would buy Google stock (and practically everyone who already held the stock would immediately sell) because most investors do not believe that Google can ever pay enough dividends or buy back enough stock to justify such a high valuation. A company's market cap is a collective estimate of how much money the company will to return to investors in the future. When the company is publicly-traded in an open informational regime such as the US, this collective estimate is usually quite "accurate" in the sense that it is very difficult for any single analyst or single team of analysts to improve on the estimate. An investor can make a big bet on a small company, yes, but the market cap of a company is more than just an indication of how much money has been bet on the company: it also mean that every investor (big or small) who still holds the stock believes that the expected amount of money that company will return to shareholders exceeds the market cap: if there were a holder of Google stock that did not believe that, he would convert the shares into treasury bills or cash in the bank.
- alistairSH 1y ago3000 employees is a lifestyle business? lol. That’s a new one.
- umeshunni 1y agoBoth those companies are 2 orders of magnitude smaller than Amazon or Google.
- __loam 1y agoOpenAI and Anthropic are practically subsidiaries of Microsoft and Amazon. Neither would exist without billions in cloud compute credits from their corporate benefactors. Competing in Generative AI requires the kind of resources that are only available to extremely large and established companies. I do not think all the wrapper companies count when most of them are either being bought out by the big guys or have products that are immediately outmoded in the span of months. Maybe you can make the argument for AI art companies, but Stability basically disintegrated after wasting $100m dollars and Mid journey is directly competing with Google and Meta which is not where I would want to be (aside from running a ghoulishly evil company trying to kill artistic expression).
- bdangubic 1y agoSam Altman et al are only “quite new” to my friend’s newborn son :)