Yet another Hacker News

The obscure trust looming over Anthropic's IPO

68 points 1vuio0pswjnm7 7 hours ago 23 comments

crystaln 1 hour ago | parent

[flagged]

downrightmike 54 minutes ago | parent

There is no moat

DennisP 26 minutes ago | parent

Contrary to popular belief, plenty of long-term profitable businesses have no moat. It's just that if you use Warren Buffett's investment strategy and want to buy stocks to keep for decades, companies with moats are the surest way of doing that.

2tttt 21 minutes ago | parent

Excess returns.

Heard of it? No? Shut up then. You have no idea what you’re talking about.

krona 5 minutes ago | parent

or network effects, or intangible assets (e.g. a brand, patents) or even economies of scale which they own and can leverage.

als0 54 minutes ago | parent

Why? Do you think frontier AI will never generate enough profit to justify its costs? The market seems to move on vibes rather than logic. I can imagine one of those company failing and the other seizing the market.

freecodeio 43 minutes ago | parent

while what you say is true, trillions of dollars and thousands of people invested in something that ultimately leads to a few companies from china doing the same 10x cheaper is a vibe that can go so far

lenerdenator 33 minutes ago | parent

I know that there are a few regulated industries that will go out of their way to not have any prod data ever exposed outside of the United States.

"China can do it cheaper" applies well to your personal projects. It doesn't apply well when you handle things like trade secrets, healthcare, or financial data.

redanddead 17 minutes ago | parent

I promise you China can do it cheaper is good enough for many corporates that have neutral views at best on the labs

These are open models, go speak to corporates see what they’re up to

Also the healthcare bit is funny. Go ask the healthcare bigs and their intermediates what they’re doing today, hint it’s India

freecodeio 13 minutes ago | parent

huh? assuming you're in america right now, the device you're using to publish that comment has been built in china or had most of it's components anyways, which are from some very trade secret-sensitive companies

stymaar 7 minutes ago | parent

> It doesn't apply well when you handle things like trade secrets, healthcare, or financial data.

OpneAI stole valuable secrets from their customers Buckmaster and Alpöge, why should a company expect them not to do the same with their trade secrets?

InsideOutSanta 34 minutes ago | parent

> Do you think frontier AI will never generate enough profit to justify its costs?

I don't know, but I'm not sure it matters. Anthropic and OpenAI still have such large market shares only because their services are heavily subsidized. This can't go on forever.

At some point, they will have to stop burning investor money and start hiking prices. At that point, all of their competitors will look even better than they do now. So I don't see how these two companies in particular can generate enough profit to justify their costs.

2tttt 23 minutes ago | parent

Correct and before some idiot comes in and says ‘high gross profit margin’

Yeah shut up idiot - they need to raise prices to cover operating expenditures and reinvestment that stays inline with the valuation. If it implodes they’ll have trouble raising money later and they’ll need to lay off people - aka on bad terms.

iAMkenough 21 minutes ago | parent

They and their partners can’t pay off the debt to buy top-of-the-line inference hardware before it becomes obsolete and requires more debt to buy the next generation of top-of-the-line inference hardware.

This cycle will continue every 3-5 years. Given the supply for this hardware can’t keep up with the demand, they’ll be expected to pay more with each cycle.

dang 51 minutes ago | parent

Ok, but please don't post unsubstantive comments to Hacker News.

impossiblefork 32 minutes ago | parent

Yeah, i calculated something like that earlier.

But with a 2T valuation-- if they did raise, let's say, 300B, that's a 15% float, maybe they'd have a chance.

518 B in future compute obligations for the coming decade. 300 B, then 218 B is left. That's 13x their current revenue, not too far from 10x their current revenue.

Perhaps they could survive if they raised 300B. With that they'd only need to increase revenue a little bit, and that's probably possible, what with inflation and all.

The big problem is if there's improvements in AI accelerators that aren't going to be be bought by the companies that the people to whom Anthropic have obligations are likely to buy from. So if Google, AWS or NVIDIA end up not being the leaders in tokens/$, then Anthropic are screwed.

I'm not sure how the total picture ends up if one adds OpenAI to the picture.

mixdup 59 minutes ago | parent

Never once have heard about Warby Parker being a PBC

ex-aws-dude 43 minutes ago | parent

Feels like the start of an OpenAI repeat

adeptima 16 minutes ago | parent

friend of mine told me Antropic turned off 200 usd a month subscription, refused to extend and switched to usage base for large cyberop vendor he works for

when this happened PR rate dropped 95% in the first day, thousands devs, managers started to panic and downscaling all AI first intiatives and cap 500 usd a month token usage . most tokens were burned in the first day of the week.

as management got pissed, M$ people managed to sneak in and sell Copilot with up 600 usd a month token usage per dev …

devs and devops are now the most unhappy about models switch and probably haven’t seen the impact of sucking entire code base in copilot. copilot is too slow for them too. addiction to claude code is clearly present. using personal software licenses and unauthorised soft is strictly forbidden

story is clearly not over yet ..

as for myself, i’m ready to pay up to 1k usd a month … if if … claude gives the edge… but if it becomes commodity im gone next day

very curious what other devs in corporations are experiencing. deep inside cheerleading for 2 tie token ecosystem - full price for corporations and subsidized for small shops and indie

sevengraff 11 minutes ago | parent

The article is mostly about how this trust is powerful and there are very few details of how it operates or under what circumstances it would take an action. When Anthropic goes public, is that the kind of thing that would need to be disclosed? Would we expect to know all the details of the trust?

grey-area 8 minutes ago | parent

No.

6thbit 4 minutes ago | parent

> They own no Anthropic equity and don’t share in its profits

Can they own other AI related equities?

I guess there's a lack of details to go on at this point. Finding humans that you'd want as trustees and have also truly no conflicts of interest will be tricky.