6 ms·

If we're doing historical comparisons, there was so much hype for AOL and Yahoo that drove valuations far beyond the economics. In time, the hypesters were prov

by panarky 4mo ago

If we're doing historical comparisons, there was so much hype for AOL and Yahoo that drove valuations far beyond the economics. In time, the hypesters were proved wrong. In contrast, there was overwhelming doom and gloom for Google's IPO, in spite of their incredible growth and margin economics. In time, the doomers were proved wrong. There's so much doom and gloom about Anthropic that directly contradicts their astounding growth and margins. For a long-term investor, Anthropic is looking a lot more like Google not AOL. I can only hope the doomer narrative dominates until I can get a few shares at a reasonable valuation. Vibes are almost always wrong. Ignore the vibes and focus on revenue growth rates and inference margins.

ifwinterco 4mo ago
I don't think it's really doom and gloom, that's mostly on here. The normies are all still excited/scared and the valuation based on secondary trading is going up and up. Maybe not quite as crazy as the dot com boom but I'd say the current environment for AI and related equities is a lot closer to the mid/late 90s than 2004
- panarky 4mo ago
  Normies are on fire for SpaceX, where the economics are horrible and the hype is off the charts. Normies have never heard of Anthropic, where the economics are incredible and doom vibes are pervasive.
  - boelboel 4mo ago
    I think both have a similar amount of people who know about it. But it might just be my circle which is mostly in finance and some in engineering/medicine. These are also the type of people who actually invest. There's little doom vibes among those who're older if anything they're the one who think we'll get to some agi type situation.
  - deleted 4mo ago
    [deleted]
  - elzbardico 4mo ago
    I don't buy Anthropics narrative around their "incredible" economics, actually, I feel a lot of wework vibes from them.
piker 4mo ago
> astounding ... margins Citation needed for that one.
davedx 4mo ago
"until I can get a few shares at a reasonable valuation" I doubt you will. Most likely IPO reference price will be like SpaceX's, 100x ARR or so. You're better off buying Google who own a huge chunk of Anthropic at a much saner average.
- panarky 4mo ago
  If it's 100x ARR then I'll watch from the sidelines. But if it's 40x in October, and inference margin is strong, and revenue is still growing 20% per month, then I'm in.
- 0xDEAFBEAD 4mo ago
  For reference, here's an NYU prof's website which shows typical ARR valuation multipliers by industry (see Price/Sales ratio column): https://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~adamodar/New_Home_Page/datafile/psdata.html https://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~adamodar/New_Home_Page/datafile... 100x is staggering. These companies are priced as though we are already chewing through the solar system to create AI computronium. I'll pass--I expect I'll get a UBI when that scenario happens anyway.
pseudosavant 4mo ago
Google is an excellent example of the companies that followed after the initial batch of big dotcom companies. They ate Yahoo's lunch. The dotcom bust was in 2000, and Google went public in 2004. I'm betting more on the successors to this initial group of AI companies. The ones that have to build actual profitable businesses.
- radicalbyte 4mo ago
  Google was easily 10x better than any of their competition. It was effectively alone in the market. Most of us were using 56k modems to access the internet back then, Google's search returned results within a couple of seconds. Yahoo, Lycos, Excite, Alta-Vista were still loading. Then the search results themselves were so good you could often just pick the first result. They eventually added a button which just took you directly to the first result. Which I used.
  - vinnymac 4mo ago
    Curious, why do you say that as if the "I'm Feeling Lucky" button isn't still on the homepage in 2026?
    - bravoetch 4mo ago
      I couldn't even tell you when I used the Google search page. It's been years at least. I wouldn't be surprised if many other people also don't go there to search. I assume most search straight in the url bar.
      - esseph 4mo ago
        Home pages are still a thing are are often set to google
    - consp 4mo ago
      Because it is useless now.
    - 4mo ago
card_zero 4mo ago
So you're raising the topic of vibes, to tell us to ignore them. Most of the time, they're wrong half the time.
arw0n 4mo ago
History does not repeat itself, but it rhymes. Drawing these comparisons to the Dotcom bubble is only of limited utility. I think there's good reason to believe that recursive self-improvement is a bust, and LLM models will become a commodity. The real value lies in multi-modal integration and good harnesses. The current frontier labs are theoretically in a good position to capitalize on this, but it is far from obvious that they will succeed. I think Google and some of the chinese giants are in a far better position to actually go the last mile.
ai_fry_ur_brain 4mo ago
They've changed the rules that will force these companies into every ETF commonly held by people's 401ks. The doomer narrative doesnt matter, they're forcing the common man to be the exit liquidty for the elite before the bubble pops.
sigmar 4mo ago
>I can only hope the doomer narrative dominates until I can get a few shares at a reasonable valuation. I conjecture that some amount of the "doomer posting" is a consequence of other people realizing what you realized here and attempting to sway public sentiment for personal gain.
- 0xDEAFBEAD 4mo ago
  I doomer post because I see three basic possibilities: * It's a bubble, it crashes (no moat etc.) * It's not a bubble, we get superintelligence, it's not nice, it squishes us all like bugs * It's not a bubble, we get superintelligence, it's nice, we all get UBI From the perspective of your personal financial security, the range of scenarios where you want to invest in Anthropic seems rather narrow. And I don't like to fund the creation of something which might squish me like a bug.
whall6 4mo ago
Ah yes, time tested and battle hardened inference margins.
MagicMoonlight 4mo ago
Anthropic is selling a commodity item that was just invented. It’s like investing in someone who is blowing lightbulb glass by hand. We’ve already seen a startup make a chip which generates a hundred pages of text in milliseconds. When companies start bringing out hardware like that for cutting edge models, the entire business is dead. AWS will just eat the market.
- lobocinza 4mo ago
  Anthropic is a software company.
0xbadcafebee 4mo ago
> focus on revenue growth rates and inference margins And ignore debt you can't pay back? Fine during ZIRP era because there was always another $50M around the corner. There is no extra $50B around the corner. They've all over-invested in AI, same as the railroads, and it will collapse the same way.
EvgeniyZh 4mo ago
I don't see how they can keep their margins with all the pressure from Chinise models. It got to be race to the bottom on margins. They (together with OpenAI and maybe Google) can have better margins on frontier models, but the demand on those got to be much lower
- 0xDEAFBEAD 4mo ago
  Exactly. Many people will choose the cheapest possible model that's smart enough for their use case. "Frontier" is a transient property; open models tend to catch up in 6 months or so.
newsicanuse 4mo ago
I am really surprised that people are comparing dot com with AI. Atleast dot-com era was deterministic, comparatively AI is just a probabalistic unreliable slop
- ben_w 4mo ago
  The growth of the Internet will slow drastically, as the flaw in “Metcalfe’s law”—which states that the number of potential connections in a network is proportional to the square of the number of participants—becomes apparent: most people have nothing to say to each other! By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet’s impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine’s. - Nobel prize winning economist Paul Krugman, in 1998, https://quoteinvestigator.com/2023/10/26/internet-fax/ https://quoteinvestigator.com/2023/10/26/internet-fax/ (Why do people try to criticise AI as "probabalistic" like this matters? Unreliable I get, but early Wikipedia and Geocities were as deterministically unreliable as the amateur and fiction sections respectively of a bookstore)
  - newsicanuse 4mo ago
    An economist exytrpolating tech trends is already a hard sell. And deterministic unreliability is atleast deterministic meaning you can choose to ignore, this is still better than probabilistic AI hubris
intended 4mo ago
You've covered both bases here. The issue is that the way the rules have been changed, risky stocks have been added to a product that is meant to be stable. A 401k, any retirement focused product, is not serving its purpose when it tags on risk. Having people in the later part of their lives find they are broke, becuse despite them doing everything right, a loophole was created to extract their savings. This is simply not right.
0xDEAFBEAD 4mo ago
Revenue growth might be great, inference margins might be great. Where's the moat?
antasvara 4mo ago
I'm not against a fundamentals-based argument. The revenue growth is wild and their margins are reported to be great. But the existential concern remains: what happens if models start plateauing? I could be wrong, but the margins are so good because there isn't a "substitute" for the frontier models. The performance difference between the latest Opus and a more open model provider is large enough to justify the extra cost. If that difference shrinks, I think the cost people are willing to pay will go way down.
- moljac024 4mo ago
  I would argue models have been plateauing for quite some time now.

by panarky 4mo ago

ifwinterco 4mo ago

I don't think it's really doom and gloom, that's mostly on here. The normies are all still excited/scared and the valuation based on secondary trading is going up and up. Maybe not quite as crazy as the dot com boom but I'd say the current environment for AI and related equities is a lot closer to the mid/late 90s than 2004

panarky 4mo ago
Normies are on fire for SpaceX, where the economics are horrible and the hype is off the charts. Normies have never heard of Anthropic, where the economics are incredible and doom vibes are pervasive.
- boelboel 4mo ago
  I think both have a similar amount of people who know about it. But it might just be my circle which is mostly in finance and some in engineering/medicine. These are also the type of people who actually invest. There's little doom vibes among those who're older if anything they're the one who think we'll get to some agi type situation.
- deleted 4mo ago
  [deleted]
- elzbardico 4mo ago
  I don't buy Anthropics narrative around their "incredible" economics, actually, I feel a lot of wework vibes from them.

piker 4mo ago

> astounding ... margins Citation needed for that one.

davedx 4mo ago

"until I can get a few shares at a reasonable valuation" I doubt you will. Most likely IPO reference price will be like SpaceX's, 100x ARR or so. You're better off buying Google who own a huge chunk of Anthropic at a much saner average.

panarky 4mo ago
If it's 100x ARR then I'll watch from the sidelines. But if it's 40x in October, and inference margin is strong, and revenue is still growing 20% per month, then I'm in.
0xDEAFBEAD 4mo ago
For reference, here's an NYU prof's website which shows typical ARR valuation multipliers by industry (see Price/Sales ratio column): https://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~adamodar/New_Home_Page/datafile/psdata.html https://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~adamodar/New_Home_Page/datafile... 100x is staggering. These companies are priced as though we are already chewing through the solar system to create AI computronium. I'll pass--I expect I'll get a UBI when that scenario happens anyway.

pseudosavant 4mo ago

Google is an excellent example of the companies that followed after the initial batch of big dotcom companies. They ate Yahoo's lunch. The dotcom bust was in 2000, and Google went public in 2004. I'm betting more on the successors to this initial group of AI companies. The ones that have to build actual profitable businesses.

radicalbyte 4mo ago
Google was easily 10x better than any of their competition. It was effectively alone in the market. Most of us were using 56k modems to access the internet back then, Google's search returned results within a couple of seconds. Yahoo, Lycos, Excite, Alta-Vista were still loading. Then the search results themselves were so good you could often just pick the first result. They eventually added a button which just took you directly to the first result. Which I used.
- vinnymac 4mo ago
  Curious, why do you say that as if the "I'm Feeling Lucky" button isn't still on the homepage in 2026?
  - bravoetch 4mo ago
    I couldn't even tell you when I used the Google search page. It's been years at least. I wouldn't be surprised if many other people also don't go there to search. I assume most search straight in the url bar.
    - esseph 4mo ago
      Home pages are still a thing are are often set to google
  - consp 4mo ago
    Because it is useless now.
  - 4mo ago

card_zero 4mo ago

So you're raising the topic of vibes, to tell us to ignore them. Most of the time, they're wrong half the time.

arw0n 4mo ago

History does not repeat itself, but it rhymes. Drawing these comparisons to the Dotcom bubble is only of limited utility. I think there's good reason to believe that recursive self-improvement is a bust, and LLM models will become a commodity. The real value lies in multi-modal integration and good harnesses. The current frontier labs are theoretically in a good position to capitalize on this, but it is far from obvious that they will succeed. I think Google and some of the chinese giants are in a far better position to actually go the last mile.

ai_fry_ur_brain 4mo ago

They've changed the rules that will force these companies into every ETF commonly held by people's 401ks. The doomer narrative doesnt matter, they're forcing the common man to be the exit liquidty for the elite before the bubble pops.

sigmar 4mo ago

>I can only hope the doomer narrative dominates until I can get a few shares at a reasonable valuation. I conjecture that some amount of the "doomer posting" is a consequence of other people realizing what you realized here and attempting to sway public sentiment for personal gain.

0xDEAFBEAD 4mo ago
I doomer post because I see three basic possibilities: * It's a bubble, it crashes (no moat etc.) * It's not a bubble, we get superintelligence, it's not nice, it squishes us all like bugs * It's not a bubble, we get superintelligence, it's nice, we all get UBI From the perspective of your personal financial security, the range of scenarios where you want to invest in Anthropic seems rather narrow. And I don't like to fund the creation of something which might squish me like a bug.

whall6 4mo ago

Ah yes, time tested and battle hardened inference margins.

MagicMoonlight 4mo ago

Anthropic is selling a commodity item that was just invented. It’s like investing in someone who is blowing lightbulb glass by hand. We’ve already seen a startup make a chip which generates a hundred pages of text in milliseconds. When companies start bringing out hardware like that for cutting edge models, the entire business is dead. AWS will just eat the market.

lobocinza 4mo ago
Anthropic is a software company.

0xbadcafebee 4mo ago

> focus on revenue growth rates and inference margins And ignore debt you can't pay back? Fine during ZIRP era because there was always another $50M around the corner. There is no extra $50B around the corner. They've all over-invested in AI, same as the railroads, and it will collapse the same way.

EvgeniyZh 4mo ago

I don't see how they can keep their margins with all the pressure from Chinise models. It got to be race to the bottom on margins. They (together with OpenAI and maybe Google) can have better margins on frontier models, but the demand on those got to be much lower

0xDEAFBEAD 4mo ago
Exactly. Many people will choose the cheapest possible model that's smart enough for their use case. "Frontier" is a transient property; open models tend to catch up in 6 months or so.

newsicanuse 4mo ago

I am really surprised that people are comparing dot com with AI. Atleast dot-com era was deterministic, comparatively AI is just a probabalistic unreliable slop

ben_w 4mo ago
The growth of the Internet will slow drastically, as the flaw in “Metcalfe’s law”—which states that the number of potential connections in a network is proportional to the square of the number of participants—becomes apparent: most people have nothing to say to each other! By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet’s impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine’s. - Nobel prize winning economist Paul Krugman, in 1998, https://quoteinvestigator.com/2023/10/26/internet-fax/ https://quoteinvestigator.com/2023/10/26/internet-fax/ (Why do people try to criticise AI as "probabalistic" like this matters? Unreliable I get, but early Wikipedia and Geocities were as deterministically unreliable as the amateur and fiction sections respectively of a bookstore)
- newsicanuse 4mo ago
  An economist exytrpolating tech trends is already a hard sell. And deterministic unreliability is atleast deterministic meaning you can choose to ignore, this is still better than probabilistic AI hubris

intended 4mo ago

You've covered both bases here. The issue is that the way the rules have been changed, risky stocks have been added to a product that is meant to be stable. A 401k, any retirement focused product, is not serving its purpose when it tags on risk. Having people in the later part of their lives find they are broke, becuse despite them doing everything right, a loophole was created to extract their savings. This is simply not right.

0xDEAFBEAD 4mo ago

Revenue growth might be great, inference margins might be great. Where's the moat?

antasvara 4mo ago

I'm not against a fundamentals-based argument. The revenue growth is wild and their margins are reported to be great. But the existential concern remains: what happens if models start plateauing? I could be wrong, but the margins are so good because there isn't a "substitute" for the frontier models. The performance difference between the latest Opus and a more open model provider is large enough to justify the extra cost. If that difference shrinks, I think the cost people are willing to pay will go way down.

moljac024 4mo ago
I would argue models have been plateauing for quite some time now.