We're in a VC bubble; any project that mentions AI gets tons of money.
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.
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.
Unreasonable doesn’t even start to capture it. Anthropic being worth 10% of Alphabet is beyond insane.
I could see two or three percent, but this seems like a pretty big stretch. Then again, I'm not a VC.
If AI is winner take all, then the value is effectively infinite. Obviously insane, but maybe it's winner take most?
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/
Investors are forward looking, and market conditions can change abruptly. If Anthropic actually displaces Google, it's amazingly cheap at 10% of Alphabet's market cap. (Ironically, I even knew that NVidia was displacing Intel at the time I invested, but figured that the magnitude of the transition couldn't possibly be worth the price differential. News flash: companies can go to zero, and be completely replaced by others, and when that happens their market caps just swap.)
Right now nobody wants to be the first to offer advertising in LLM services, but LLM conversation history provides a wealth of data for ad targeting. And in more permissive jurisdictions you can have the LLM deliver ads organically in the conversation or just shift the opinions and biases of the model through a short mention in the system message
You may not agree with the market's estimation of that, but comparing just present revenue isn't really the right comparison.
As I said, insane. And that’s not even considering the 10 to 15% shares of Anthropic actually owned by Alphabet.
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.
Step 2: achieve AGI.
Step 3: ?
Step 4: transcend money.
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
Anthropic have several similiar competitors with actual real distribution and tech. Ones that can go 10x are underdogs like Google before IPO or Amazon, or Shopify etc. Anthropic current stock is beyond that. Investors no longer give any big opp. to public. They gain it via private funding
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.
Convincing billions of users to make a new account and do all their e-mail on a new domain? A new YouTube channel with all new subscribers? Migrate all their google drive and AdSense accounts to another company, etc?
This is trivially simple and creates no moat?
I think this is like ChatGPT, but it generates "inner monologue" in the background, and the "inner monologue" is then added to the context, and this "addresses" "sycophancy, attention deficits, and inconsistent prioritization"
Basically, 5x-ing revenue in 8 months off of a billion dollars starting revenue is insane. Growing this quickly at this scale breaks every traditional valuation metric.
(And no - this doesn't include margins or COGS).
I know you aren't asserting this but rather just putting the argument out there, but to me at least it's interesting comparing a company that has vendor lock-in and monopoly or duopoly status in various markets vs one that doesn't.
I'd argue that Google's products themselves haven't been their moat for decades -- their moat is "default search engine status" in the tiny number of Browsers That Matter (Arguably just Chrome and Mobile Safari), being entrenched as the main display ad network, duopoly status as an OS vendor (Android), and monopoly status on OS vendor for low-end education laptops (ChromeOS). If somehow those were all suddenly eliminated, I think Google would be orders of magnitude less valuable.
I do think this is important. Many of the best researchers are also religious AGIists and Anthropic is the most welcoming to them. This is a field where the competence of researchers really matters.
Machine ice became competitive in India and Australia in the 1850s, but it took until the start of World War 1 (1914) for artificial ice production to surpass natural in America. And the industry only disappeared when every household could buy a refrigerator.
Self-driving doesn't have to scale globally to be economically viable as a technology. It could already be viable at $400k in HCOL areas with perfect weather (i.e. California, Austin, and other places they operate).