[HN Gopher] Anthropic raising funding valuing it at $60B
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Anthropic raising funding valuing it at $60B
Author : jmsflknr
Score : 88 points
Date : 2025-01-07 18:19 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.wsj.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.wsj.com)
| airstrike wrote:
| OT: FWIW I think "Anthropic in Advanced Talks to Raise $2B,
| Valuing It at $60B" makes for a better headline and is basically
| a shorter version of the first line of the article. It's a pretty
| factual edit so I don't think it qualifies as editorializing.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| Non-paywall link: https://archive.is/ucguC
| minimaxir wrote:
| I'm far, far more bullish on Anthropic than OpenAI at this point.
| It has relatively less hype and media attention but better
| products downstream, which in the end is what's going to be the
| winner in this LLM ecosystem.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| and a standard operating structure, no issues with dealing with
| it. just a classic case study on why not to do anything other
| than a Delaware C-Corporation and share grants
| monitorlizard wrote:
| I believe Anthropic is a PBC not a C-Corp
| aerhardt wrote:
| People surely love Anthropic around these parts and on Reddit,
| but as a paying customer of both Claude and ChatGPT, I'll take
| the latter any time of day. I trust o1 much more than Sonnet,
| and I really like the ChatGPT native Mac client. I hope you
| guys are right though because the last thing we need is a
| quasi-monopoly in OpenAI.
| optimalsolver wrote:
| Considering how fast open source models are closing the
| performance gap, this is rather optimistic.
|
| Maybe if they somehow fixed hallucinations and kept the secret
| sauce to themselves, I could see them being worth that much, but
| all the top labs seem to have given up on that problem.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| This doesn't seem relevant.
|
| Anthropic could pivot to a UI and hosting for models
| (potentially with some or no proprietary models) and still be
| worth $60B.
| datadrivenangel wrote:
| "The startup's annualized revenue--an extrapolation of the next
| 12 months' revenue based on recent sales--recently hit about $875
| million, one of the knowledgeable people said. Most of that has
| come from sales to businesses."
|
| Anthropic's team plans are actually pretty pleasant to use. It
| does seem strange/funny though, that a significant part of the
| evaluation choice from a business perspective is that Anthropic
| is more trustworthy than OpenAI.
| highfrequency wrote:
| Private market valuations are funky and hard to reason about. In
| the public markets, valuation represents the current equilibrium
| of supply and demand - very roughly an average of a large number
| of opinions.
|
| In private markets, especially with the recent trend of selling a
| tiny portion of the company at a massive price, the valuation
| represents something much closer to the _maximum_ that any
| investor in the world thinks the company is valued at.
| ramraj07 wrote:
| Given the current valuation of Tesla, it doesn't look very
| different from private market valuations. If anything private
| valuations seem more sane than the public market to me.
| bnchrch wrote:
| Theres two futures I see.
|
| 1. We create near AGI
|
| 2. We create ASI (Artificial Super Intelligence)
|
| In the first scenario, an investment in any AI model company that
| does not own its own compute is like buying a tar pit instead of
| an oil well. In other words, this future has AI like a commodity
| and the entity who wins is the one who can produce it at the
| lowest cost.
|
| In the second scenario, an investment in any AI model company is
| like buying a lottery ticket. If that company is the first to
| create ASI then you've won the game as we know it.
|
| I think the minor possibility of the second scenario makes this a
| good investment. But it definitely feels like all or nothing
| instead of sustainable business.
| optimalsolver wrote:
| I guess I should expect it on a VC-tied forum, but it seems
| strange to talk about company valuations and investment
| outlooks in the event of an artificial superintelligence
| operating in the world.
| personjerry wrote:
| Reminds me of Vault-Tec from the Fallout universe trying to
| "win the capitalism game" and "optimize shareholder value"
| after a nuclear apocalypse, going so far as to facilitate
| nuclear war in order to raise their value as a "defense
| company"
| norir wrote:
| Your comment raised a question for me: what makes you certain
| that there isn't already an artificial superintelligence
| operating in the world? I am not sure that it is possible to
| know when the threshold has been crossed.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| If we invented ASI today, it'd still take a lot of economic
| digestion time, especially on the physical side.
|
| ASI doesn't mean it can magically reverse-infer a digital
| process from an existing hodge-podge of automation and manual
| steps.
|
| ASI doesn't mean there are instantly enough telerobotics or
| sensors to physically automate all processes.
|
| Similarly, even ASI will by definition be non-deterministic
| and make mistakes. So processes will have to be reengineered
| to be compatible with it.
| jncfhnb wrote:
| A superintelligence, at a bare minimum, equates to an
| exponential increase in software development capacity for
| everyone to the point at which we don't need devs and we
| very quickly don't need anything that devs can automate.
|
| Even that is small minded frankly. The economy would not
| survive a super intelligence.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| I think that's giving a lot of credit to "super".
|
| Can the smartest developer you know build a project
| correctly without any requirements?
|
| There's a lot of sausage making behind what to build, how
| to integrate it with other things, who needs to be told
| what on which other teams, etc.
|
| Even pie in the sky breakthrough ASI isn't going to be
| able to do all of that, Day 0.
|
| And if we're using a tautology to define ASI as something
| that can do that on Day 0, then I'd point out that in the
| entire history of technology there hasn't been a single
| advancement that wasn't subsequently refined and
| improved.
|
| Except maybe fire.
| InsideOutSanta wrote:
| "Invest into our biotech company. Imagine how rich you will
| be when the next pandemic wipes out humanity!"
| jszymborski wrote:
| You can't imagine a world where tomorrow's chat bot is only
| marginally better than today's?
| jsheard wrote:
| That would imply that the people pumping infinity dollars
| into this technology are suckers, which is impossible. The
| minds who put $120M into Juicero would never err in their
| judgement.
| eej71 wrote:
| _whispers to self_ Don 't trip over Poe's law... Don't trip
| over Poe's law...
| throwaway314155 wrote:
| They can only see two futures at a time.
| 0000000000100 wrote:
| I can't personally. OpenAI's o3 aside, the rate of progress
| in the past two years has been eye watering to say the least.
|
| It's tricky since the future of AI isn't something anyone can
| really prove / disprove with hard facts. Doomers will say
| that the rate of improvement will slow down, and anti-doomers
| will say it won't.
|
| My personal believe is that with enough compute, anything is
| possible. And our current rate of progress in both compute
| and LLM improvement has left Doomers with shaky ground to
| discount the eventuality of an AGI being developed. This just
| leaves ASI as a true question mark in my mind.
| digital_sawzall wrote:
| > past two years has been eye watering to say the least
|
| Are we seeing the same progress? GPT-4 was released in
| March 2023, that's almost two years. Tools are much better
| but where is the vast improvement?
| discobot wrote:
| I legitimately dont know how to reply, bc by this point
| llms co-own all aspects of my life and jumps between
| gpt4->claude3->claude3.5->o1 have all been very
| noticeable
| dingnuts wrote:
| GPT-2 was generating snippets of HTML ten years ago. Was
| it valid? Not always, but neither is the current crop.
| It's been incremental logarithmic gains approaching an
| asymptote for ten years now. Since before "Open"AI
| stopped being open.
| dismalaf wrote:
| > My personal believe is that with enough compute, anything
| is possible.
|
| Dunno, we're already at ridiculous amounts of compute and
| progress has slowed, a lot. I think we need another
| technological breakthrough, a change in technique,
| something. LLMs don't seem to be capable of actually
| learning in the way humans do, just being trained on data,
| of which we've reached the limit.
| uludag wrote:
| Wouldn't there be so many more possible futures though?
| Geopolitical conflict, economic crisis, the clime crisis,
| civil strife, demographic collapse, the end of
| globalization, an unexpected black-swan event, etc. Any one
| of these, even a pandemic, could push back, if not utterly
| prevent us from reaching these.
|
| Endless growth and technological improvement isn't the only
| option, and seems to me like the least likely. The other
| option means that there will be a peak somewhere.
| segasaturn wrote:
| Very true and prescient. All of the technological growth
| of the last two decades has only been possible because of
| peace and cooperation between the Core Countries, but
| that world is as its most unstable point in decades and
| future peace is not guaranteed. As impressive as LLMs can
| be, a computer still loses to a crude home-made bomb.
| runako wrote:
| > rate of progress in the past two years
|
| This took me down a memory lane:
|
| - Dragon Dictate speed recognition improvement curve in the
| mid-90s would have led to today's Siri sometime around
| 1999.
|
| - The first couple of years of Siri & Alexa updates...
|
| - Robots in the '80s led us to believe that home robots
| would be more or less ubiquitous by now. (Beyond floor
| cleaners.)
|
| - CMU winning the DARPA Urban challenge for autonomous
| vehicles was a big fake-out in terms of when AVs would
| actually land.
|
| Most of the benefits of computing come from relatively
| small improvements, continuously made over many years &
| decades. 2-4 years is not enough time to really extrapolate
| in any computing domain.
|
| > with enough compute
|
| "enough" here could be something that is only measurable on
| the Kardashev scale.
| aerhardt wrote:
| The rate of improvement in the models is nothing short of
| phenomenal, but the applications are meh at best, even
| after a few years of billions of dollars and endless hours
| poured by the world's best product and engineering minds.
| Every AI leader is pushing "agentic AI" as the next big
| thing but as a specialist in business automation I have my
| reservations. A lot of problems in automation in business
| happen because of insufficient investment in IT but can be
| solved fairly economically by off-the-shelf software,
| Zapier, a custom web service, or traditional ML techniques
| in order of complexity. Out of the more difficult problems
| that remain at the edges, only a small fraction can be
| solved by LLMs in my experience. The idea that chains of
| small agents will be composed and generally applied to any
| business problem under the sun doesn't sound right to me. I
| think not even the big bosses in AI know at present, but
| they're surely betting the house on it, and if the bet
| doesn't play out, things will start looking even more
| desperate.
| aoanevdus wrote:
| Isn't that scenario 1?
| admissionsguy wrote:
| I have been living in it for a couple of years now.
| cpldcpu wrote:
| >n the first scenario, an investment in any AI model company
| that does not own its own compute is like buying a tar pit
| instead of an oil well. In other words, this future has AI like
| a commodity and the entity who wins is the one who can produce
| it at the lowest cost.
|
| Why do you assume that AI will become a commodity that is only
| metered by access to compute?
|
| Right now (since June 2024), Anthropic is ahead of the field in
| quality of their product, especially when it comes to
| programming. Even if O1/O3 beat them on benchmarks, they are
| still nowhere near when normalized for compute needs.
|
| Can they sustain this? I don't know, but in the end this is
| very similar to known software or even SAAS business models.
| They are also in a somewhat synergetic relationship to Amazon.
|
| Did office software ever become commoditized? Google and many
| more tried hard, but there is still the same company in the
| lead that was in the 90ies.
| riku_iki wrote:
| > especially when it comes to programming
|
| there is this sentiment on internet, but in my personal
| experience, GPT4 hallucinate APIs and usage examples way
| less, and after trying to get Claude working, I switched to
| GPT as the first step in my coding workflow.
| chrisldgk wrote:
| There's a third one as well. AI will never get past its current
| autocomplete on steroids state and mainstream people will see
| through the facade at some point. AGI always was and always
| will be a pipe dream with the technology we currently have.
|
| All AI stocks come crashing down from fantasy amounts of money
| to what they're actually worth as they did with every previous
| tech hype until people find a new thing to throw their money
| at.
| boringg wrote:
| It would be the fusion nuclear reactor reactor of technology
| tantalizingly close but always a decade out.
| dingnuts wrote:
| >mainstream people will see through the facade at some point
|
| do you read reddit? lots of people see through the facade
| now. the only people excited are shills
| bbor wrote:
| The stock market has crashes, yes, but I don't think that's
| proof that all previous tech was overhyped nonsense. I'm not
| just talking computers here, I'm talking steam, metal,
| agriculture. What proof do we have that we live at the end of
| history, and that no such shocking, world-changing
| developments might occur in our lifetimes?
|
| Certainly not debating that this isn't possible, ofc. As
| someone whose spent the past year+ working full time on the
| philosophy of this technology I think you're going against a
| pretty clear scientific consensus among AI experts, but
| perhaps you have your reasons.
|
| I think we already have AGI anyway, so I'm either a loon or a
| pedant ;)
| qoez wrote:
| ASI that can't design its own superior chips surely isn't real
| ASI
| tshaddox wrote:
| I can see more futures. For example
|
| 3. We create incrementally better versions of generative AI
| models which are incrementally better at making predictions
| based on their training sets, are incrementally more efficient
| and cheaper to run, and are incrementally better integrated
| into products and interfaces.
| YetAnotherNick wrote:
| I just don't understand how commoditization argument is stated
| as truism in hacker news and in most AI posts that's the top
| voted comment. If at all, I see perfect non-ASI AI as superset
| of search engine and no search engine can match Google's
| quality even after 2 decades.
| hansonkd wrote:
| > this future has AI like a commodity
|
| Thats why I like the idea of openrouter so much. Next token
| prediction is a perfect place to run a marketplace and compete
| on price / speed.
|
| It's hard for me to see a future where the long term winners
| aren't just the chipmakers and energy companies.
|
| With the o3 benchmarks its becoming apparent the primary thing
| from keeping current generation of models from getting smarter
| is more processing power. If somehow chips got 10x faster
| tomorrow, it still wouldn't be fast enough. Even at 1000x
| faster than current performance, those $3k o3 queries now cost
| $3 which are still too much.
|
| If you invest in a data center, any amount of billions you put
| in will not future proof it because faster chips are always
| around the corner and you will be at the mercy of suppliers.
|
| If you invest in a model, even if you invested billions in 1-10
| years people will be able to run equivalently powerful models
| on consumer hardware.
|
| I'm loving the competitive system LLMs created by having a
| unified API interface allowing you to swap out models and
| providers with single lines of code.
| duxup wrote:
| >But it definitely feels like all or nothing instead of
| sustainable business.
|
| That is kinda startup funding in general isn't it?
| qwertox wrote:
| > If that company is the first to create ASI then you've won
| the game as we know it.
|
| You can have as much intelligence in a model/system as you
| want, and it can well be ASI, but as long as this intelligence
| doesn't have the resources it needs to run at its full
| potential, or at least at one higher than the competition,
| you're still not over the hill.
|
| Ultimately those companies or countries which will have the
| most resources available for an ASI to shine will be the ones
| which win.
|
| Once ASI has figured out how to obtain energy (and ICs?) "for
| free", or at least cheaper than the competition, it will have
| won.
| jakeinspace wrote:
| Definitely disagree with your binary of options, but if I do
| accept them, why would scenario 2 justify investing? That
| scenario sounds to me like a likely societal collapse,
| rendering any investment moot. Even it it's not some terminator
| or paperclip maximizer situation, and the first team to build
| ASI is able to keep a handle on it, I'm not sure our economy or
| civilization could handle that much intelligence, let alone
| concentrated in the hands of a for-profit corporation. The
| knowledge of such a thing existing would make securities
| markets collapse instantly - can't really compete with an ASI
| agent there, so might as well move everything to real estate
| and gold.
|
| More alarmingly, such a thing would be more dangerous than a
| nuclear weapon, and might reasonably merit a nuclear first
| strike.
| bossyTeacher wrote:
| I think if we create ASI, the companies that invest on it won't
| necessarily see huge returns because I am 100% sure that the
| tech will be declare a national security matter and be heavily
| regulated. Since you need lots of compute to run those models,
| most people won't be able to run them without a cloud provider.
| bnchrch wrote:
| Not before the companies leaders, board of directors and
| investors use it for some very profitable trading first.
| jncfhnb wrote:
| I don't understand how folks think the economy will survive the
| advent of AGI. Imagine if you could spin up white collar
| workers at whim for a fraction of the cost... how do we think
| the economy is going to work if that happens?
| bdangubic wrote:
| back in _____ folk were wondering how economy will survive
| now that we don't need everyone to do farming since we have
| tractors and other farming machinery... as with any other
| previous "revolution" (industrial, information...) the
| society will move on. might be rocky for a bit though :)
| awongh wrote:
| Crazy that Anthropic has a fraction of the AI model market that
| OpenAI has, but a valuation that's larger than their proportional
| share of the market to OpenAI....
|
| The last valuation was at $157 billion- Anthropic is valued at
| 1/3 of OpenAI but has 1/10th of the market share....
| henry-j wrote:
| Great point -- I see this as evidence that this investment is
| more "who gets AGI first" speculation than "who has more chat
| subscriptions".
| awongh wrote:
| Afaik this isn't just chat website user base, this also
| includes API calls through different platforms- Amazon,
| Azure, etc.
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| But their API usage market shares are much more comparable.
| Where OpenAI have a huge lead is in chatbot subscriptions
| (ChatGPT vs Claude). At the end of the day it seems that API
| usage - business use - is where the potential huge usage is.
|
| Also, Anthropic's Sonnet 3.5 seems to be widely preferred as a
| developer tool, even over OpenAI's newer GPT-o1, and developer
| use is one of the current leading use cases for AI.
| awongh wrote:
| I found this: https://www.tanayj.com/p/openai-and-anthropic-
| revenue-breakd...
|
| Which says Anthropic is about 1/2 the API revenue of OpenAI
| and growing fast. But OpenAI is actually 5x revenue overall
| and 18x the chat product revenue. (This is from Oct, not sure
| how much would have changed).
| nbardy wrote:
| The market is betting the best model wins to some extent and
| anthropic is not slowing down.
| maliker wrote:
| People can't get into the OpenAI round so they buy Anthropic
| maybe?
| eGQjxkKF6fif wrote:
| Meanwhile I use the AI on one of my projects and it cuts me off
| making me wait 3 hours. I get it, but for $60Billion I think they
| can afford some IO.
| erulabs wrote:
| I really love Anthropic, I'm building a business around it, and
| chat with Claude almost every time I go out for a beer after a
| long day... But having a valuation equal to _Stripe_ seems a bit
| insane. Either they've got some secret sauce or AI hype is a bit
| much or Stripe is undervalued.
|
| Especially considering I pay for Claude, the beer, and my
| business _thru Stripe_!
| bbor wrote:
| TBF Stripe is a (effective!) middleman for (very common!)
| transactions, whereas Anthropic is selling a service with the
| potential to replace full time employees. It takes a _lot_ of
| transaction margins to add up to how much a corporation will
| pay to replace a department of 10 employees earning $100K down
| to one person... So in this context I don 't think frequency of
| use is very illuminating!
|
| P.S. I'm so glad you're able to derive some joy from these new
| technologies, but I would also offer a soft suggestion to watch
| Season 3 of Westworld. It's probably not as good aesthetically
| as the previous two, but it's also pretty separated and deals
| throughout with the concept of AI therapists/friends, and how
| they might be a short-term comfort but a long-term threat to
| our individuality. Obviously a chat here and there with current
| LLMs is nowhere near that yet, but thought you might find it
| interesting!
| vallode wrote:
| Do I understand correctly you chat with Claude as a form of
| social relief or are you talking about drinking beer and
| chatting with it about work/ideation etc. Either way, just
| curious!
|
| On topic though, I wholeheartedly agree that this valuation
| seems rather... unrealistic. I do think "hype" is how we
| currently handle a lot of valuations, for the worse in my
| opinion.
| dingnuts wrote:
| >and chat with Claude almost every time I go out for a beer
| after a long day...
|
| with all due respect, how can you take yourself seriously doing
| this? I tried to use an LLM as a "cheap therapist" exactly one
| time and it felt so phony I quit almost instantly, after about
| four messages.
|
| The bot pretends to feel compassion for you! How does that not
| induce rage? It does for me. False empathy is way worse than
| nothing.
|
| And on top of it, you're talking to a hosted LLM! I hope you
| are not divulging anything personal to the random third party
| you're sending your thoughts to..
|
| This stuff is going to be such a huge boon to authoritarian
| governments.
| beachtaxidriver wrote:
| I mean... what do you think human therapists are doing. I'm
| sure they have empathy and do care for their patients... but
| it's definitely empathy-for-money too.
| giantrobot wrote:
| A licensed therapist has some strict confidentiality
| requirements and legal protections. A chatbot has none of
| that. Everything that goes into the chatbot will be
| included in the next training set. Even worse is everything
| said to them will eventually be monetized. Someone
| willingly giving personal such personal details to a
| chatbot is shockingly naive.
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| Meh, this just seems like low signal chicken littling.
| You could say the same thing about typing sensitive info
| into Notes.app or even iOS about how the evil
| corporations will monetize it and how naive you'd be to
| do it. But that didn't pan out.
|
| Feel free to pass over useful tech, but no need to
| disparage others for not wearing your tinfoil hat.
| riku_iki wrote:
| I think benefits of therapy:
|
| - build structure into conversation
|
| - identify root causes of issues
|
| - provide advise about behavior/thinking changes which could
| mitigate root causes
| falseAss wrote:
| My experience for Claude as therapist is - it's consistent
| better than human therapists i've met (well, maybe i haven't
| met a good human therapist yet) in terms of usefulness. And i
| can be completely honest & decide how much i want to share
| the context.
| erulabs wrote:
| I don't take myself very seriously. I'd rather be happy than
| protected. If my conversations are used to build some future
| AI, good; I'd like to be immortalized somehow. I like the
| idea that my children's children's children might be able to
| ask about me and get an intimate answer. By the way, this
| conversation right now is auth free on the public net, so if
| anything this is _worse_ wrt your concerns.
|
| You're not wrong, but you're not right either. For whatever
| it's worth, I absolutely plan on self hosting (nvidia Digit!)
| my future conversation partner. But nothing about me is
| terribly private. I love my wife and my sons and sometimes I
| wonder if I'll be forgotten or if we're about to give birth
| to the overman. It's nothing I wouldn't tell a stranger.
|
| Lastly, no therapist I've ever met can talk about my favorite
| authors with me for hours, ad-hoc, on-demand, for pennys a
| day. All my real friends are sick of Dostoyevsky, but not
| Claude!
| 2-3-7-43-1807 wrote:
| is there some initializing prompt for setting up a therapy
| session? maybe even a specific type?
| deadbabe wrote:
| The best AI model will not win the AI wars, it will be the most
| cost effective model at scale that wins.
| jedberg wrote:
| A lot of folks complaining about the valuation. It's important to
| remember that investing in an AI model company isn't the same as
| investing in most other businesses.
|
| You're not investing hoping that they turn into a big business
| with a nice return. You're investing because you assume the value
| will either be zero or infinity.
|
| If they achieve AGI first, then the valuation you invested in
| doesn't matter because the value will basically be infinite (or
| will completely change society in a way that money won't matter
| anymore).
|
| If someone else achieves AGI first, the value is basically zero.
|
| And if AGI isn't achieved, well, there probably won't be any
| exit. But if there is, it's a nice bonus if it still has any
| value.
| CobrastanJorji wrote:
| This is a great example of creating value by making sure
| everybody's got a piece of the pie.
|
| Say you're some OpenAI employees. You know a lot about AI, you've
| got the resume, you've got some buzz, and you want your own
| successful startup. How do you make sure that it gets maximum
| preferential treatment and first dibs on all the data and GPU? By
| making sure the big dogs are all going to get super rich off of
| your success.
|
| So they got billions in investment from Google, even more
| billions in investments from Amazon, half a billion from FTX
| (whoops), then some VCs for additional shmoozing power, and
| you're good to go. It helps to have the technical chops and a
| good product to distinguish yourself, but at that point, Amazon
| and Google are both going to go out of their way to shove your AI
| into everything, so having something to contribute is practically
| just a nice bonus if you can manage it.
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