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But how is another company that is also VC backed and losing money providing stability for Bun? How long before we hear about “Our Amazing Journey”? On the ot
by raw_anon_1111 11mo ago
But how is another company that is also VC backed and losing money providing stability for Bun?
How long before we hear about “Our Amazing Journey”?
On the other hand, I would rather see someone like Bun have a successful exit where the founders seem to have started out with a passion project, got funding, built something out they were excited about and then exit than yet another AI company by non technical founders who were built with the sole purpose of getting funding and then exit.
- simonw 11mo agoAnthropic may be losing money, but a company with $7bn revenue run rate (https://www.anthropic.com/news/statement-dario-amodei-american-ai-leadership https://www.anthropic.com/news/statement-dario-amodei-americ...) is a whole lot healthier than a company with a revenue of 0.
- tyingq 11mo agoIf I had the cash, I could sell dollar bills for 50 cents and do a $7b run rate :)
- simonw 11mo agoIf that was genuinely happening here - Anthropic were selling inference for less than the power and data center costs needed to serve those tokens - it would indeed be a very bad sign for their health. I don't think they're doing that. Estimates I've seen have their inference margin at ~60% - there's one from Morgan Stanley in this article, for example: https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-anthropic-billions-cloud-revenue-growth-2025-7 https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-anthropic-billions-cl...
- hollerith 11mo agoThe leaders of Anthropic, OpenAI and DeepMind all hope to create models that are much more powerful than the ones they have now. A large portion of the many tens of billions of dollars they have at their disposal (OpenAI alone raised 40 billion in April) is probably going toward this ambition—basically a huge science experiment. For example, when an AI lab offers an individual researcher a $250 million pay package, it can only be because they hope that the researcher can help them with something very ambitious: there's no need to pay that much for a single employee to help them reduce the costs of serving the paying customers they have now. The point is that you can be right that Anthropic is making money on the marginal new user of Claude, but Anthropic's investors might still get soaked if the huge science experiment does not bear fruit.
- JumpCrisscross 11mo ago> their investors might still take a bath if the very-ambitious aspect of their operations do not bear fruit Not really. If the technology stalls where it is, AI still have a sizable chunk of the dollars previously paid to coders, transcribers, translators and the like.
- bpavuk 11mo agobut those AI/ML researchers aka LLM optimization staff are not cheap. their salaries have skyrocketed, and some are being fought for like top-tier soccer stars and actors/actresses
- 1shooner 11mo ago>The bank's analysts then assumed Anthropic gross profit margins of 60%, and estimated that 75% of related costs are spent on AWS cloud services. Not estimate, assumption.
- simonw 11mo agoIf Morgan Stanley are willing to stake their credibility on an assumption I'm going to take that assumption seriously.
- SiempreViernes 11mo agoCalling this unmotivated assumption an "estimate" is just plain lying though, regardless of the faith uou have in the source of the assumption.
- simonw 11mo agoI've seen a bunch of other estimates / claims of a %50-60 margin for Anthropic on serving. This was just the first one I found a credible-looking link I could drop into this discussion. The best one is from the Information, but they're behind a paywall so not useful to link to. https://www.theinformation.com/articles/anthropic-projects-70-billion-revenue-17-billion-cash-flow-2028 https://www.theinformation.com/articles/anthropic-projects-7...
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- skywhopper 11mo agoThis is pretty silly thing to say. Investment banks suffer zero reputational damage when their analysts get this sort of thing wrong. They don’t even have to care about accuracy because there will never be a way to even check this number, if anyone even wanted to go back and rate their assumptions, which also never happens.
- simonw 11mo ago
- verdverm 11mo agoI've been wondering about this generally... Are the per-request API prices I'm paying at a profit or a loss? My billing would suggest they are not making a profit on the monthly fees (unless there are a bunch of enterprise accounts in group deals not being used, I am one of those I think)
- viscanti 11mo agoThey had pretty drastic price cuts on Opus 4.5. It's possible they're now selling inference at a loss to gain market share, or at least that their margins are much lower. Dario claims that all their previous models were profitable (even after accounting for research costs), but it's unclear that there's a path to keeping their previous margins and expanding revenue as fast or faster than their costs (each model has been substantially more expensive than the previous model).
- simonw 11mo agoIt wouldn't surprise me if they found ways to reduce the cost of serving Opus 4.5. All of the model vendors have been consistently finding new optimizations over the last few years.
- manmal 11mo agoI sure hope serving Opus 4.5 at the current cost is sustainable. It’s the first model I can actually use for serious work.
- mgfist 11mo agoSurely you understand the bet Anthropic is making, and why it's a bit different than selling dollars at a discount
- myhf 11mo agoBecause discounted dollar bills are still a tangible asset, but churning language models are intangible?
- beepbooptheory 11mo agoMaybe for those of us not-too-clever ones, what is the bet? Why is it different? Would be pretty great to have like a clear articulation of this!
- shwaj 11mo agoThe bet, (I would have thought) obviously, is that AI will be a huge part of humanity’s future, and that Anthropic will be able to get a big piece of that pie. This is (I would have thought) obviously different from selling dollars for $0.50, which is a plan with zero probability of profit. Edit: perhaps the question was meant to be about how Bun fits in? But the context of this sub-thread has veered to achieving a $7 billion revenue.
- beepbooptheory 11mo agoThe question is/was about how they intend to obtain that big piece of pie, what that looks like.
- throwaway-0001 11mo agoDo you know any translators? They all pretty much lost much of their clients. Devs can write at a very fast rate with ai.
- econ 11mo ago
- liuliu 11mo agoYou are saying that you can raise $7b debt at double-digit interest rate. I am doubtful. While $7b is not a big number, the Madoff scam is only ~$70b in total over many years.
- tyingq 11mo agoNo, I'm scamming myself. Halving my fortune because I believe karma will somehow repay me ten fold some time later.
- ineedasername 11mo agoSomehow? I've been keeping an eye on my inbox, waiting to get a karma vesting plan from HN, for ages. What's this talk of somehow?
- robocat 11mo ago> the Madoff scam is only ~$70b in total Incorrect - that was the fraudulent NAV. An estimate for true cash inflow that was lost is about $20 billion (which is still an enormous number!)
- mritchie712 11mo agoyou have anthropic confused with something like lovable. anthropic's unit margins are fine, many lovable-like businesses are not.
- tyingq 11mo agoOr I'm just saying revenue numbers alone don't prove anything useful when you have deep pockets.
- weakfish 11mo agoIdk, I’m no business expert by any means, but I’m a hell of a lot more _scared_ by a company burning so much that’s $7b is still losing
- indemnity 11mo agoI am fairly skeptical about many AI companies, but as someone else pointed out, Anthropic has 10x'ed their revenue for the past 3 years. 100m->1b->10b. While past performance no predictor of future results, their product is solid and to me looks like they have found PMF.
- Sephr 11mo agoThey don't need revenue, they need a community. I don't know how this acquisition will affect that.
- copedetector 11mo ago[flagged]
- rvnx 11mo agoOften it happens that VCs buy out companies from funds belonging to a fresh because the selling fund wants to show performance to their investors until "the big one", or move cash one from wealthy pocket to another one. "You buy me this, next time I save you on that", etc... "Raised $19 million Series A led by Khosla Ventures + $7 million" "Today, Bun makes $0 in revenue." Everything is almost public domain (MIT) and can be forked without paying a single dollar. Questionable to claim that the technology is the real reason this was bought.
- raw_anon_1111 11mo agoIf it was an acquihire, still a lot less slimy than just offering the employees they care about a large compensation package and leaving the company behind as a husk like Amazon, Google and Microsoft have done recently.
- KK7NIL 11mo agoIs it? What's wrong with hiring talent for a higher salary? You have no responsibility for an unrelated company's operations; if that was important to them they could have paid their talent more.
- JumpCrisscross 11mo agoFrom the acquirer’s perspective, you’re right. (Bonus: it diminishes your own employees’ ability to leave and fundraise to compete with you.) From an ecosystem perspective, acquihires trash the funding landscape. And from the employees’ perspective, as an investor, I’d see them being on an early founding team as a risk going forward. But that isn’t relevant if the individual pay-off is big.
- KK7NIL 11mo ago> And from the employees’ perspective, as an investor, I’d see them being on an early founding team as a risk going forward. Every employee is a flight risk if you don't pay them a competitive salary; that's just FUD from VC bros who are getting their playbook (sell the company to the highest bidder and let early employees get screwed) used against them.
- nathan-wall 11mo ago> But how is another company that is also VC backed and losing money providing stability for Bun? Reminds me of when Tron, the crypto company, bought BitTorrent.
- wmf 11mo agoThe difference is that Tron is a scam and BitTorrent Inc was nothing special either.
- hamdingers 11mo agoMatch made in heaven considering BitTorrent Inc bundles crypto miners and other malware with μTorrent.
- dhosek 11mo agoGIF of Pam from the office saying, “They’re the same picture.”
- lacker 11mo agoThe real risk is not that Anthropic will run out of money, but that they will change their strategy to something that isn't Bun-based, and supporting Bun won't make sense for them any more.
- manmal 11mo agoIs there anything you’d need from bun in the future that can’t be done by forking it?
- kelvinjps10 11mo agoI misread Amazon, implying that Amazon might buy Anthropic, and I think that's what will end up happening.
- raw_anon_1111 11mo agoIn my three or four non chatbot related projects, I’ve found Amazon’s Nova models to be just as good as Anthropic’s.