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Anthropic raises $13B Series F

(www.anthropic.com)
585 points meetpateltech | 6 comments | 02 Sep 25 16:04 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source | bottom
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llamasushi ◴[02 Sep 25 16:29 UTC] No.45105325[source]▶
The 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

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DebtDeflation ◴[02 Sep 25 16:48 UTC] No.45105641[source]▶
The wildest part is that the frontier models have a lifespan of 6 months or so. I don't see how it's sustainable to keep throwing this kind of money at training new models that will be obsolete in the blink of an eye. Unless you believe that AGI is truly just a few model generations away and once achieved it's game over for everyone but the winner. I don't.
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jononor ◴[02 Sep 25 17:02 UTC] No.45105828[source]▶
It is being played like a winner-takes-it-all right now (it may or may not be such a market). So it is a game of being the one that is left standing, once the others fall off. In this kind of game, speeding more is done as a strategy to increase the chances of other competitors running out of cash or otherwise hitting a wall. Sustainability is the opposite of the goal being pursued... Whether one reaches "AGI" is not considered important either, as long as one can starve out most competitors.

And for the newcomers, the scale needs to be bigger than what the incumbents (Google and Microsoft) have as discretionary spending - which is at least a few billion per year. Because at that rate, those companies can sustain it forever and would be default winners. So I think yearly expenditure is going to be 20B year++

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leptons ◴[02 Sep 25 17:26 UTC] No.45106214[source]▶
It's the Uber business plan - losing money until the competition loses more and goes out of business. So far Lyft seems to be doing okay, which proves the business plan doesn't really work.
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simianwords ◴[02 Sep 25 18:54 UTC] No.45107453[source]▶
Uber is profitable so why do you think it doesn't work?
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oblio ◴[03 Sep 25 04:42 UTC] No.45112311[source]▶
Because the competition hasn't gone out of business (at least outside the US where tons of other ride hailing apps are available in most major locales) and because 16 (SIXTEEN!!!) years after founding Uber is still net profit negative: over its lifetime it has lost more money than it made.

The only people that really benefited from Uber are:

- Uber executives

- early investors that saw the share price go up

- early customers that got VC subsidized rides

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1. simianwords ◴[03 Sep 25 06:15 UTC] No.45112728[source]▶
Are you predicting that they can't be net profitable?
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2. oblio ◴[03 Sep 25 07:21 UTC] No.45113129[source]▶
No, I'm predicting that:

1. opportunity costs are a thing.

2. if you add Uber's financial numbers since creation, the crazy amount of VC that was invested Uber would have provided better returns by investing it in the S&P 500.

3. Uber will settle in as a boring, profitable company that's going to be a side note in both the history of tech and also of transportation and will primarily be remembered for eroding worker rights.

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3. simianwords ◴[03 Sep 25 08:58 UTC] No.45113631[source]▶
I don't get your point. You would have still made more money investing in Uber than in S&P.
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4. oblio ◴[03 Sep 25 09:59 UTC] No.45113986{3}[source]▶
No, you wouldn't have, unless you were one of handful VCs or Uber execs (ok, and a bunch of pre-IPO Uber employees).

Uber IPO May 2019: market cap $82bn. Uber now: $193bn. 2.35x multiplier.

S&P 500 May 2019: $2750. S&P 500 now: $6460. 2.35x multiplier.

So the much, much riskier Uber investment has barely matched a passive S&P 500 investment over the same time frame. And the business itself has lost money, more money was put into it than has been gotten back so far.

I'm not even sure why I'm in this conversation as it seems ideological. I bring up facts and you bring up... vibes?

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5. simianwords ◴[03 Sep 25 10:47 UTC] No.45114264{4}[source]▶
Let me get this straight.

I was replying to this: "So far Lyft seems to be doing okay, which proves the business plan doesn't really work." when I said Uber is profitable

Your retort to that was S&P grew more than Uber, which is a nonsensical argument. Our standard for what is a good business is if it grows faster than S&P after going public?

Edit: I dug up some research related to this, most companies do worse than S&P after becoming public. What's your point then?

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6. nly ◴[04 Sep 25 18:05 UTC] No.45130252{5}[source]▶
Most people can't invest in a company pre-IPO, so it's irrelevant

The same is currently true of Anthropic.