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Anthropic raises $13B Series F
- farceSpherule 1y agoDon't worry... It will crash down soon enough just like the Internet did back in the 90's after similar, insane investments in infrastructure.
- duxup 1y agoThese numbers seem made up at times / difficult to comprehend what they expect is happening ...
- chpatrick 1y agoDepends on if you think we're at the end of AI development or the beginning.
- Rebuff5007 1y agoProbably because they are made up, and no one is able to comprehend what is happening.
- isoprophlex 1y agoIt's a post-money valuation, so that suggests the money involved has transcended beyond actual moneyness into some other post-meaningful realm.
- saberience 1y agoPost-money just means you add the value of the actual investment into the valuation. E.g. The pre-money valuation would be 183B - 13B. i.e. pre-money valuation would be 170B
- aroman 1y agoI think you missed their joke :)
- saberience 1y agoOr the joke was so bad and non-obvious that their comment just reads like someone who has no idea what "post-money" actually means :)
- AlienRobot 1y agoStep 1: burn billions of dollars. Step 2: achieve AGI. Step 3: ? Step 4: transcend money.
- perks_12 1y agoLook at this post: https://x.com/NicoleSHsing/status/1961505968782774778 https://x.com/NicoleSHsing/status/1961505968782774778 We're in a VC bubble; any project that mentions AI gets tons of money.
- seneca 1y agoThat genuinely feels like satire. I guess the beauty of good satire is that it borders on reality. The Juicero of the AI era.
- koakuma-chan 1y agoWhat's wrong with that post?
- edm0nd 1y agoits some GPT wrapper app that has 100 downloads. also if your founder has to use dozens of buzzwords when asked to describe what their app does and that still doesn't even explain it, its obviously just bs. "Arcarae’s mission is to help humanity remember and unlock the power each individual holds within themself so they can bring into reality their unique, authentic expression of self without fear or compromise. Our research endeavors are designed to support this mission via computationally modeling higher-order cognition and subjective internal world models." lol
- koakuma-chan 1y ago> lol What do you mean lol? Isn't that awesome? Feel free to share if you think that isn't awesome. I personally don't think there is enough information here to tell if that is awesome or satire, but it is interesting how usually things like this are considered awesome, but this particular one is deemed satire.
- beAbU 1y agoThe post borders on turbo encabulatoe levels of insanity. It makes zero sense. What does the product do?
- aaronblohowiak 1y agoalphabet is "worth" 2.45 trillion on the public market, is anthropic worth a bit less than 10% of google going forward? I don't think that's entirely unreasonable...
- potatoproduct 1y agoSounds hugely unreasonable. At 1% I might've believed you.
- StopDisinfo910 1y agoAlphabet 2024 revenue: 350 billions dollars Anthropic 2024 revenue: 1 billion dollars Unreasonable doesn’t even start to capture it. Anthropic being worth 10% of Alphabet is beyond insane.
- charcircuit 1y agoThe valuation is not based solely on last year's revenue. Revenue doesn't really matter at this point.
- StopDisinfo910 1y agoAnthropic competes solely in one of Alphabet multiple markets and that’s a market where Google already has a compelling competitive offer. This valuation gap doesn’t make any sense to me.
- y0eswddl 1y agoAnd that's not even looking at profits vs valuation...
- YetAnotherNick 1y ago> The company said its run-rate revenue has increased from around $1 billion at the beginning of 2025, to more than $5 billion in August. So 10% of valuation for 1.5% of revenue, which grew 5x in last 6 months. Doesn't seem as unrealistic as you put it, if it has good gross margin which some expects to be 60%. Also Google was valued at $350B when it had $5B revenue.[1] [1]: https://companiesmarketcap.com/alphabet-google/marketcap/ https://companiesmarketcap.com/alphabet-google/marketcap/
- paulpauper 1y agoPeople said the same about Open AI in 2023, only valued at $30 billion at the time, and then seemingly overnight Chat GPT become a major commercial product rivaling Google. Or Tesla valuations in 2019. It went from a niche brand to Teslas everywhere after Covid. These VCs are not as irrational as commonly assumed. They know if a product gains critical mass , it can become everything.
- duxup 1y agoI'm not sure a couple successes makes sense of these numbers.
- lm28469 1y agoIt's still bleeding money with no profitability in sight, niche product or household name
- paulpauper 1y agosame again for Amazon, Tesla, Uber and others. Then they began making billions. Anthropic is not a niche anymore though. Same for Chat GPT.
- lm28469 1y agoAre they the exceptions or the rules, that's the question.
- Zigurd 1y agoThat's a pretty random selection. Amazon makes money. Uber is clawed their way back from the pit of doom of not having a viable business model and being led by a jackass. Tesla is a meme stock. At best these examples tell us nothing.
- anthem2025 1y agoAre you really trying to argue Tesla is fairly valued? In 2025? When their sales have nosedived, new products have flopped, their CEO is the most disliked man in America, and their self driving still requires someone in the car at all times? Tesla is a GameStop level meme stock.
- tinyhouse 1y agoThis is the fastest-growing company by revenue, jumping from $1B to $3B in just five months. Hitting $10B is only a matter of time, which would put its valuation at a reasonable ~18x sales multiple. It doesn't even matter where we are in the AI hype cycle - AI adoption will keep increasing, it's not even a question at this point. From a technical perspective, they manage to attract top talent - Google / OpenAI lose a lot of good people to Anthropic. This is important since there are few people who can transform a business (e.g., the guy who built Claude Code). Being attractive for top talent means you're more likely stumble upon them.
- miltonlost 1y agoMy baby grew from 9 pounds to 18 pounds in a 3 months! Hitting 10000 lbs is only a matter of time.
- aqme28 1y agoI thought ~20x or so was a good baseline earnings multiple. I have no idea what makes sense as a revenue multiple but I bet it would be a lot lower than that. Edit: After looking it up, normal P/Sales ratios are on the order of about 1. They vary from like .2 to 8 depending on industry.
- tinyhouse 1y agoYou should check a few software companies that are publicly traded. Figma for example is at P/S ~38 multiple currently. Google at 6.8. If Anthropic would've done an IPO today they would probably be at ~100 given where Figma is.
- paulpauper 1y agoFTX creditors should be seeing red. the trustee sold Anthropic out at the bottom. Same for crypto. Hindsight is 20-20, but imagine had CZ not made those tweets of divesting from the FTT token. FTX could have possibly weathered the final 3 months of the BTC bear market and then reaped the post-2023 AI and crypto bull market. Sam would have gone from pauper in jail to brilliant investor in Anthropic, mogul, and so on.
- ealexhudson 1y agoThe trustee's reports on FTX's internal processes were damning. Even they had held their Anthropic on the way up, who's to say their internal FTT ledger and black holes in the Alameda books would not have eclipsed that? The issue wasn't that crypto markets in general were down at that point; the issue was they were doing frauds.
- paulpauper 1y agothe frauds were stopped by Sam going to jail. There was still money left by liquidating, which in hindsight was a very poor timing.
- ealexhudson 1y agoSure, but would we really want to tell liquidators to manage assets for best eventual return rather than just convert everything to cash? In this instance, in hindsight, sure - you'd want the other thing, you want the bitcoin not the cash. But this feels like the exception that proves the rule.
- dgacmu 1y agoThe job of the trustee of a bankrupt company is not to commit further fraud by gambling with the remaining funds.
- triceratops 1y ago> hindsight If the liquidators had perfect hindsight, they'd be trading their own money. Not cleaning up other people's messes. Their job is to be responsible and follow procedure.
- jdoliner 1y agoEvery round Anthropic raises twists the knife deeper in SBF. If only he could have survived the downturn his Antropic investment alone probably could have papered over the other loses.
- paulpauper 1y agoyeah, had CZ not made those tweets... He only had to weather another 2 months of the BTC bear market. BTC began to rebound in Jan 2023. Of course hindsight is 20-202
- arduanika 1y agoCZ was a minor factor. Someone internal leaked the balance sheet. Hindsight says, don't do fraud.
- Aeolun 1y agoOr hide it better?
- Nextgrid 1y agoFraud is only called fraud if you get caught and defraud the wrong people. Corporation-on-consumer fraud is generally OK and a lot of businesses we consider "legitimate" do it as standard practice. Fraud against investors and "the rich" can still be papered over and forgotten if everyone ends up richer in the end. SBF just got unlucky.
- ramesh31 1y ago>"Every round Anthropic raises twists the knife deeper in SBF. If only he could have survived the downturn his Antropic investment alone probably could have papered over the other loses." Things working out in the end doesn't make what he did not a crime at the time. He was a common paper hanger, albeit with billions instead.
- yunwal 1y ago
- usrnm 1y agoI 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
- Hamuko 1y agoSo, a bubble?
- fullshark 1y agoThe real world sees no other opportunities for outsized returns. Too much money chasing too little opportunity.
- prasadjoglekar 1y agoYup! Public markets are at all time highs. Other hard assets are also at all time highs. This sort of speculative investment only makes sense when nothing else is attractive. And it's cash from asset managers. Its not 10Bn worth of compute time from Microsoft or Google.
- simianwords 1y agoIts a strange way to view things.. the investors found a place to invest money from which they can make profits and they did it. Much like any other investment. What do you think makes this more speculative than any other investment?
- marcosdumay 1y agoThat's what wealth inequality does.
- triceratops 1y ago+100
- wagwang 1y agoNo that's what low interest rates does
- rvz 1y agoEnron was worth $60B - $100B once.
- NewJazz 1y agoIntel still is.
- potatoproduct 1y agoI predict a lot of people are going to lose a lot of money.
- xpe 1y agoCompare with “I predict people are going to die.” Clear, testable predictions are possible if you try.
- Dave_Wishengrad 1y ago[dead]
- llamasushi 1y agoThe 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 world but if you can't get 100k H100s and a dedicated power plant, you're out. Wonder how much of this $13B is just prepaying for compute vs actual opex. If it's mostly compute, we're watching something weird happen - like the privatization of Manhattan Project-scale infrastructure. Except instead of enriching uranium we're computing gradient descents lol The wildest part is we might look back at this as cheap. GPT-4 training was what, $100M? GPT-5/Opus-4 class probably $1B+? At this rate GPT-7 will need its own sovereign wealth fund
- duxup 1y agoIt's not clear to me that each new generation of models is going to be "that" much better vs cost. Anecdotally moving from model to model I'm not seeing huge changes in many use cases. I can just pick an older model and often I can't tell the difference... Video seems to be moving forward fast from what I can tell, but it sounds like the back end cost of compute there is skyrocketing with it raising other questions.
- ljlolel 1y agoThe scaling laws already predict diminishing in returns
- renegade-otter 1y agoWe do seem to be hitting the top of the curve of diminishing returns. Forget AGI - they need a performance breakthrough in order to stop shoveling money into this cash furnace.
- jayde2767 1y ago"cash furnace", so aptly put.
- baalimago 1y agoPrediction: this is the final big "hufff" before the bubble bursts.
- NitpickLawyer 1y agoIf we make a comparison to the dotcom bubble, this bubble will take the equivalent of catsdotcom and dogsdotcom, not the equivalent of FAANG++. And even that comparison is iffy, because we just don't know where the end is with this one. We've seen capabilities only increase so far. We've also seen prices decrease by orders of magnitude between SotA "generations". Things continue to scale, and no one knows how far it'll go. There's a reason everyone is doing the coding agent cli of the month, and everyone is heavily subsidising coding - data, more data, and crucially (hah) signals on generation quality, acceptance rate and so on. Take that, put it in the new generation, training goes brr, post-training goes RL, etc.
- FergusArgyll 1y agoCan you give us a date by which point you are > 90% confident in that?
- oblio 1y ago24 months.
- euLh7SM5HDFY 1y agoBubble will only burst when market runs out of money or new model releases provide little to none improvements. Or someone actually creates a real AGI. No matter how low that chance is, the FOMO among investors must be crazy.
- fourseventy 1y agoI wonder what SBF's shares would be worth.
- timack 1y agoFTX's stake in Anthropic was just under 8% so ~$14B. (if it hadn't been liquidated)
- pnathan 1y agoRun-rate revenue of 1b vs 3b. Those are big values. I am very curious about the GAAP numbers here.
- ankit219 1y agoTheir 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 $5B at end of july (so $400M that month).
- 1oooqooq 1y agoexactly. 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.
- utyop22 1y agoBut 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.
- jedberg 1y ago> 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.
- 1oooqooq 1y agohahahhahahahahahahahahhaha... oh wait, you're serious?
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- tootie 1y ago
- me551ah 1y agoI don't get the sky high valuation of LLM companies. I mean I get that these guys need a lot of money for compute to train the next generation of models. But Distillation does make it easy for other providers to replicate gains made by these providers at a much lower cost. On a long enough timeframe, the open source models will catch up to the proprietary models and inference providers will beat these proprietary companies on price.
- nradov 1y agoThe high valuations are essentially lottery tickets, not something based on any sort of calculation of discounted future cashflows. The bet is that the researchers working for some of those frontier AI model companies will come up with innovations that give them a sustainable competitive advantage that goes beyond just purchasing more compute and licensing more proprietary training data. Obviously they can't all succeed but perhaps one or two will get lucky, perhaps by figuring out how to greatly improve efficiency or something that isn't easily copied.
- bobbiechen 1y agoDid anyone else get offers to join single-purpose ventures (SPVs) to invest in this Anthropic round? I got the impression that some people were reselling access and adding layers of fees to profit from the hype.
- manveerc 1y agoMany SPVs were available for recent funding rounds, but my biggest gripe was the excessive fees layered on top of them. More importantly, we should ask who will be left holding the bag when this bubble bursts. For now, investors are getting their money back through acquisitions. Founders with desirable, traditional credentials are doing well, as are early employees at large AI startups who are cashing out on the secondary market. It appears the late-stage employees will be the ones who lose the most.
- htrp 1y agoYes... tons
- jjangkke 1y agowell i really hope they will use some of this money to compete with codex and release something quick chat gpt 5 in codex is really good so much that i stopped used claude code altogether cheaper too made me realize nobody has moat, coders especially will just go to whoever provides best bang for their buck.
- naiv 1y agoSame. We all moved to codex in the past weeks not looking back at our cancelled Max20 subscriptions. But who knows what will be to best tool/model to use in October.
- j7ake 1y agoWait did I see “ Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan” as an investor? Are they putting Canadian public funds into Anthropic?
- sebzim4500 1y agoWeren't they also a significant investor in FTX?
- arduanika 1y agoYes. So they indirectly owned some Anthropic through the FTX bankruptcy. I kinda wonder whether they somehow opted to keep their Anthropic stake when the FTX estate sold. Or maybe they bought it at some other time.
- sidewndr46 1y agowas FTX actually liquidated? Last I read the lawyers were just busy paying themselves $500,000 a day
- arduanika 1y agoYes. Among other things, the Anthropic stake was sold, and repayments have begun. The full process will probably drag out through next year at least. On the lawyer fees...do you expect someone to do it for free? Would you rather hire someone without the expertise? Do you think the crimes are the estate lawyers' fault? Process costs money. You can sneer at the professionals that work hard to keep a lawful society in order, if you like. SBF sure did. Look where that got him.
- sidewndr46 1y agoNo, I'm just surprised they actually are making payments. I had no personal stake in FTX, so I didn't closely track it.
- OhMeadhbh 1y ago
- OhMeadhbh 1y agoIs it just me or does something smell... bubbly in here?
- code4tee 1y agoImpressive 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. Everyone knows how to build these models now, it just takes a ton of cash to do it. This whole thing is turning into an expensive race to the bottom. Cool tech, but bad business. A lot of VC folks gonna lose their shirt in this space.
- dcchambers 1y agoAnd 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.
- jononor 1y agoHope 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...
- axus 1y agoThe electricians in data center country report they are earning a lot of money.
- nathan_douglas 1y agoIt'd be an interesting time for China to invade Taiwan.
- m101 1y agoWhy is this downvoted when it's spot on.. if reality < expectations so much money is sitting on extremely quickly depreciating assets. It will be bad. Risk is to the downside.
- Zigurd 1y agoSubstitute fiber and routers for GPUs and this starts to look familiar.
- hnav 1y agoCisco?
- 1oooqooq 1y agoalmost nobody remember the router craze. people don't even remember the era before the current brands. like the time a bell offshoot almost crashed canada because they siphoned all the telephone money into bad routers.
- month13 1y agoFor those curious, I found this to be a very entertaining retelling of events from Nortel's persepective: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I6xwMIUPHss https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I6xwMIUPHss
- Zigurd 1y agoI am old enough to have had the pleasure of Atiq Raza telling me the thing I was helping pitch couldn't be sold to Avaya (or was it Cisco?) in four months for $1 billion and so is not interesting, within the first four minutes of the meeting. Evidently he was seeing enough pitches for things he could sell at that price and in that time. Now he's in AI investments.
- Eiriksmal 1y agohttps://www.sec.gov/enforcement-litigation/litigation-releases/lr-20434 https://www.sec.gov/enforcement-litigation/litigation-releas... A fascinating investor. I just finished re-reading Microserfs. The buzzwords may have changed between 1993 and 2025, but the human behaviors certainly have not.
- teepo 1y agoReally good analogy: Bay Networks, Lucent, Nortel, and Cisco got beat up or destroyed on the equipment side. And then the long haul fiber companies never got ROI (but paved the way for broadband).
- j45 1y agoVery happy for them - curious if the funding will help with the current capacity issues. 5 minutes into my first opus prompt on Claude Code on an empty repo, I've already been warned by Claude Code that I'm about to hit my opus limit despite not using it in 12 days.
- tzury 1y agoWhen your product is 5x better than OpenAI, you can afford ~40% of their valuation, especially when you achieved it with simpler marketing strategies.
- vincefutr23 1y agowhy would nvidia not create their own foundational model?
- krupan 1y agoWhy didn't the people selling shovels to gold miners dig for gold themselves? Because Nvidia is making actual profit selling hardware to those who do, not hoping for a big payout sometime in the future. Different risk/reward model, different goals.
- wmf 1y agoThey have a bunch of Nemotron models. They can make more money from five(?) competing frontier labs than from trying to monopolize the frontier themselves.
- aurareturn 1y agoI'm pretty sure Nemotron models are their internal teams dogfooding to learn more about the latest AI advancements in software.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- jononor 1y agoThey are printing money right now, and their customers are taking all the risk. Just keep delivering and enjoy success.
- MangoCoffee 1y agoWhy doesn't Apple make their own iPhones instead of contracting them to Foxconn?
- utyop22 1y agoComparative advantage.
- bgwalter 1y agoInteresting that investors pay so many billions for a product that just iterates until something, somehow compiles but emits subtle garbage. Intellectual engagement goes down, users get dumber and only look at quantity. China is taking first steps to continue its excellence. In the New York Post of all places: https://nypost.com/2025/08/19/world-news/china-restricts-ai-across-the-country-to-prevent-kids-cheating-america-could-learn-from-it/ https://nypost.com/2025/08/19/world-news/china-restricts-ai-... "It’s just one of the ways China protects their youth, while we feed ours into the jaws of Big Tech in the name of progress."
- cooloo 1y agoJust a question of time until the bubble will burst.
- AnimalMuppet 1y agoOne of my rules of thumb: When money is growing on trees, pick it. That applies to individuals, but it probably also applies to companies. We're in an AI boom? Raise some money while it's easy.
- FergusArgyll 1y agoIIRC Matt Levine says: when there is a tech bubble, the correct trade is not to short the nasdaq, it's to start a company and ask Masayoshi Son for an investment
- stephencoyner 1y agoVery interesting to see firms who already bet big on OpenAI (like Altimeter) on the list for this round. Anyone else remember when OpenAI told investors they couldn’t invest in competitors [1]? [1]https://www.reuters.com/technology/openai-tells-investor-not-invest-five-ai-startups-including-sutskevers-ssi-2024-10-02/?utm_source=chatgpt.com https://www.reuters.com/technology/openai-tells-investor-not...
- unsupp0rted 1y agoHopefully this'll give them another 3 months of runway, so they can go back to letting me use Claude Sonnet for 5 hours out of the 5-hour limit, rather than the 2.5 hours I'm getting now. ($100-plan, no agents, no mcp, one session at a time)
- 1oooqooq 1y ago[flagged]
- NetOpWibby 1y agoI don't even know what this means. What a fantastic amount of money flying around though, to support my inane queries to Claude.
- fidotron 1y agoThat's now between an entire Instagram and WhatsApp acquisition cost. It's hard to escape the conclusion this is dumb money jumping on a bandwagon. To justify the expected returns here requires someone to make a transformer like leap again, and that doesn't take spending huge amounts in one place, but funding a lot more speculative thinkers.
- xpe 1y agoI don’t like to think of predicting the future as “a conclusion” of some assumptions. I don’t think it puts you in a frame of mind such that you’re genuinely curious.
- fidotron 1y ago> Remember the YouTube acquisition? To many, it seemed bonkers. Because of the legal uncertainty about what they were doing. There was no fundamental technological impediment. Here the technology simply doesn't exist and this is a giant bet that it can be magically created by throwing (a lot) more money at the existing idea. This is why it's "dumb money" because they don't seem to understand the dynamics of what they're investing in.
- xpe 1y agoUpdate: I edited my comment to focus on the mindset of making predictions (including recognizing the uncertainty and being comprehensive about possible scenarios) I made a new top-level comment mentioning the 2006 YouTube acquisition only to show that many people were shocked, but -surprise- markets are usually better predictors than individual hunches.
- fidotron 1y agoThis isn't a market in that sense though - it's very much one sided what Anthropic tells us and they are privately traded. It is very far from a situation where the price discovery mechanism is allowed to work.
- 999900000999 1y agoIs it worth it if I have an AI related idea to try and get it built ? It'll take a solid year and about 30k. Any chance of even talking to a VC as an outsider?
- makestuff 1y agoMight as well try, the worst that can happen is they say no or ignore your email.
- red2awn 1y agoIf it only takes 30k can't you bootstrap and built it yourself? Or even just work on it on the side alongside your day job.
- 999900000999 1y agoI'm going to need more than 30k to achieve a profit. I'm basically hiring a part time front end junior assistant to fill in some gaps. I'm hiring out of a cheaper county where 30k can actually do something. The idea is the first 30 gets an MVP done. I don't think I could finish anything worth selling for that.
- bradley13 1y agoThrowing 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.
- ryukoposting 1y agoThis is roughly where I am on the matter. If the energy costs stay massive, your investment in AI is really just a bet that energy production will get cheaper. If the energy costs fall, so does the moat that keeps valuations like this one afloat. If there's a step-function breakthrough in efficiency, it's far more likely to be on the model side than on the semiconductor side. Even then, investing in the model companies only makes sense if you think one of them is going to be able to keep that innovation within their walls. Otherwise, you run into the same moat-draining problem.
- simgt 1y agoYeah. Electricity production that we also need for electrifying all of our transports and industry because of climate change. Good luck getting that cheaper. That said innovation on the model side is more likely to come from a 10B-funded startup that still has some money to spare on the brightest researchers on top of giving them all the data and compute they want to play with.
- ryukoposting 1y agoI was thinking about this last night, and I find it amusing. Imagine investing in a company because it has money... your money. That you invested.
- Davidzheng 1y agothe 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.
- hsaliak 1y agoMaybe these labs should consider funding specific models, and funneling returns back to investors from profits made with those models. Like the film industry.
- farfolomew 1y agoIt’s about time the western world finally changes from a five to four-day work week! That’s just about the most tangible benefit I see this AI breakthrough delivering. What an asset to have too, socially and civilly, especially when compared to the west’s primary adversary: the CCCP and its communist message of ‘equality’ for the people when they’re still working six days a week!
- d_burfoot 1y agoThere'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 a routing service that matches customers who want LLM inference with providers If the service goes down for a day, the owner just loses a day's worth of income, nobody else cares (it's not like customers are going to be screaming at you to find their data). This kind of passive, turn-key business is a dream for many investors. Comparable passive investments like car washes, real estate, laundromats, self-storage, etc are messier.
- thoughtpeddler 1y agoIsn't this the whole premise of existing companies like SF Compute? [0] [0] https://sfcompute.com/ https://sfcompute.com/
- matt3D 1y agoI 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, but the urgency will too.
- utyop22 1y agoYeah 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.
- xpe 1y agoRemember 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 the investment levels are irrational, to what degree are they? How and why? How will it play out specifically? Predicting these accurately is hard.
- xyst 1y agoSomebody didn’t get the memo from MIT…
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- nikanj 1y ago$183B makes sense because 20 years ago something else was valued at $1.65 billion and money has decreased in value 100-fold?
- pnt12 1y agoI 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).
- 1970-01-01 1y agoWhy are they bothering with billions of dollars when crypto coins already delivered, right on schedule, the new foundation of global currency? Why aren't these previous investors pouring all of their BTC into Anthropic as fast as possible? Isn't $183,000,000,000 a massive signal that this next leap for Silicon Valley will be as solid as their previous revolution?
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- oytis 1y agoSeries what?
- arduanika 1y agoThere's a logical limit to this "private markets are the new public markets" crap. Once they finish Series Z, they have to IPO. It's the law.
- dkobia 1y agoAI investment is headed toward 2% of the US GDP, getting close to the Apollo program and 10 times the manhattan project. Almost 15% of the US stock market is tied up in these investments so most of us have skin in this game whether we like it or not, for better or worse.
- xyst 1y agoThe only people this matters to is the initial investors in earlier series or seed fund stages.
- arduanika 1y agoHa. Do you own any Amazon, Alphabet, or Salesforce, perhaps through some index fund? Congratulations, you own some Anthropic. This matters to you. And market conditions matter to you, too. Every deal is a comparable mark that factors into every other deal. Where this tech is going, and whether we're in a bubble or just getting started... these are forces that are interested in you, even if you're not interested in them.
- tpurves 1y agoAnd 75% of that just gets shipped right over to nVidia as pure profit. The mind boggles at the macro-economic inefficiency of that situation.
- didip 1y agoEveryone is so pessimistic about bubble bursting and money are simply catches on fire in this AI race… However, I remembered when Youtube was young. It was burning money every month on bandwidth. After selling out to Google, it took another decade to turned profit. But it did. And it achieved its end game. As the winner, it took all of the video hosting market. And Google reaped the entirety of that win. This AI race is playing out the same way. The winner has the ability to disrupt several FAANGs and FAANG neighbors (eg. Adobe). And that’s 1-2 trillion dollar market, combined.
- seydor 1y agoand yet it's still only ~10% of google's revenue.
- zmmmmm 1y agoYoutube is fascinating to me because it never made any sense. At the time they were starting bandwidth was expensive. How the hell did they pay the bills for that? And then every single rational piece of logic said they would be sued to oblivion due to copyright violations. Logically, Youtube should have been impossible, but here it is. I often think about that when trying to evaluate forward looking tech. Even though 99% of the time logic like that proves to be correct, it's also true that most of the time the winners in a race did that exactly because they defined some piece of the standard framework of logic that everybody else played by. Uber is similar - they shouldn't exist, they basically broke the law in most countries they moved into, brazenly violated all kinds of barriers that kept taxi industry completely entrenched for decades. But now they are dominating in most of these countries.
- utyop22 1y agoBecause there were external forces that helped propel and keep YT aloft. If smartphones and so on had not come into existence, it would have crashed and burned. "Uber is similar - they shouldn't exist, they basically broke the law in most countries they moved into, brazenly violated all kinds of barriers that kept taxi industry completely entrenched for decades" And here's a simple way to demonstrate my point - backed by VC - Uber accelerated its growth and got to the point it was so widely adopted nobody could stop them from operating.
- seydor 1y agoWhich one will hit $1T first?
- jpalomaki 1y agoValuations are high, but it's also the first time in history when developers are spending $200 per month on tools and feeling they are getting great value out of them. I think one key question is can Anthropic replicate this on some other segment. Like with people working with financials.
- m101 1y agoThis 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 confusion, uncertainty, and fanciful thinking that it reminds me of the other bubbles that existed when people had to stretch their imaginations to justify valuations - there is increasing spend on training models, and decreasing improvements in new models. This does not bode well - wealth is an extremely difficult thing to define. It's defined vaguely through things like cooperation and trade. Ultimately these llms actually do need to create "wealth" to justify the massive investments made. If they don't do this fast this house of cards is going to fall, fast. - having worked in finance and spoken to finance types for a long time: they are not geniuses. They are far from it. Most people went into finance because of an interest in money. Just because these people have $13bn of other people's money at their disposal doesn't mean they are any smarter than people orders of magnitude poorer. Don't assume they know what they are doing.
- utyop22 1y agoLol yeah I generally read most comments on here with one eye closed. This is one of the good ones though.
- xpe 1y agoIt helps me to know that there are other people noticing this. Like Fox News, a lot of comments here probably make us dumber.
- utyop22 1y agoYeah you have to be careful on the internet in general TBH. This place is better than much of the internet but still. Ah the dream would be to have this place somehow be filled with the experts on all topics and let them duel it out.
- 1y ago
- fancyfredbot 1y agoSo many negative comments here! The fact that one of the top players in a new market segment with significant growth potential can raise $13B at a 20x revenue valuation is not the bubble indicator you think it is. It's at least possible that the investment pays off. These investors almost certainly aren't insane or stupid. We may still be in a bubble, but before you declare money doesn't mean anything any more and start buying put options I'd probably look for more compelling evidence than this.
- mateus1 1y ago> These investors almost certainly aren't insane or stupid. I'm sure this exact sentence was said before every bubble burst.
- fancyfredbot 1y agoThat sounds very cynical and knowing which is obviously great, but not super interesting. Do you think the investors are insane or stupid? Do you think this is a bubble and that it's about to burst? I'm interested to know why.
- sothatsit 1y agoMost investors I've heard talk about the AI bubble have mentioned exactly that they know it is a bubble. They are just playing the game, because there is money to be made before that bubble bursts. And additionally, there is real value in these companies. I would assume the majority of investors in AI are playing a game of estimating how much more these AI valuations can run before crashing, and whether that crash will matter in the long-run if the growth of these companies lives up to their estimates.
- kittikitti 1y agoThese are the same investors who got scammed by SBF who didn't even have a basic spreadsheet that explained the finances.
- Wojtkie 1y ago
- atleastoptimal 1y agoHN in 2046 > Headline: OpenAI raises 400 Trillion, proclaims dominion over the delta quadrant > Top comment: This just proves that it's a bubble. No AI company has been profitable, we're in the era of diminishing returns. I don't know one real use case for AI It's hilarious how routinely bearish this site is about AI. I guess it makes sense given how much AI devalues siloed tech expertise.
- greenchair 1y agocomment history appears to be an AI shill account.
- atleastoptimal 1y ago>Anyone who disagrees with me is a shill account
- VirgilShelton 1y agoMy contrarian take on the astronomical costs need to scale LLM infrastructure is that since it does cost so much, innovation at the grid and power plant / renewables will also see massive gains and ultimately save our planet.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- tonymet 1y agoi guess emissions, climate concerns , economics are all just out the window here? My feeble uncle isn't allowed to buy a single lightbulb in his state yet , but burning terawatts for useless porn generators is where we are investing our engineering efforts.
- htrp 1y ago>Along with ICONIQ, the round was co-led by Fidelity Management & Research Company and Lightspeed Venture Partners. Iconiq (Mark Zuckerberg's family office) was one of the lead investors in the round
- ddxv 1y agoGood! I'm looking forward to keep using Claude free tier and giving open source projects time to catch up.
- tdhz77 1y agoI applied for some of your open positions. Looks like they should be funded now.
- ipnon 1y agoThe greatest failure of American capitalism today is that meteoric companies take decades to trade on public markets instead of years. Only the already wealthy and connected are allowed to invest in these kinds of opportunities. In the 80s and 90s Anthropic would have been trading on NYSE already. Zoomers have it rough ...
- joshcsimmons 1y agoWhat is the business model? Has anyone answered that yet? Because selling $20 subscriptions ain't it.
- Dave_Wishengrad 1y ago[dead]
- AbstractH24 1y agoI’m not sure if this is impressive or terrifying. Impressive in the valuation, terrifying in the fact that they need to keep raising and these valuations might not prove justifiable
- marstall 1y agoAs part of a longer conversation, i asked chatgpt when GPT5-level capabilities will be cheap enough to include in gift cards, throwaway plastic toys, etc. Answer was 2030-35. https://chatgpt.com/share/68b8ac92-ad28-8008-b2f4-5b1d77755896 https://chatgpt.com/share/68b8ac92-ad28-8008-b2f4-5b1d777558... ... conversation went on to envision a future where trillions of discarded full-gpt5 chips litter landfills and fungi learn to power them up and incorporate their knowledge into their biome, but you can just ignore that part
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- replwoacause 1y agoIronic timing considering their service has never performed so poorly as it is currently. One look at their subreddit paints a bleak picture at the moment, and is a far cry from a time when they were the AI darling.