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Comment by Wowfunhappy | Hacker News Reader

From the article:

> Although the payment is enormous, it is small compared with the amount of money that Anthropic has raised in recent years. This month, the start-up announced that it had agreed to a deal that brings an additional $13 billion into Anthropic’s coffers. The start-up has raised a total of more than $27 billion since its founding in 2021.

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Maybe small compared to the money raised, but it is in fact enormous compared to the money earned. Their revenue was under $1b last year and they projected themselves as likely to make $2b this year. This payout equals their average yearly revenue of the last two years.

I thought they were projecting 10B and said a few months ago they have already grown from a 1B to 4B run rate

It doesn't matter if they end up in chapter 11... If it kneecaps all the other copyright lawsuits. I won't pretend to know the exact legal details. But I am (unfortunately) old enough that this isn't my first "giant corporation benefits from legally and ethically dubious copyright adjacent activities, gets sued, settles/wins." (Cough, google books)

Personally I believe in the ideal scenario (for the fed govt.) these firms will develop the tech. The fed will then turn around and want those law suits to win - effectively gutting the firms financially and putting the tech in the hands of the public sector.

You never know, its a game of interests and incentives - one thing for sure - does does the fed want the private sector to own and control a technology of this kind? Nope.

Here is an article that discusses why those numbers are misleading[1]. From a high level, "run rate" numbers are typically taking a monthly revenue number and multiplying it by 12 and that just isn't an accurate way to report revenue for reasons outlined in that article. When it comes to actual projections for annual revenue, they have said $2b is the most likely outcome for their 2025 annual revenue.

[1] - https://www.wheresyoured.at/howmuchmoney/

But what are the profits? 1.5B is a huge amount, no matter what, especially if you’re committing to destroying the datasets as well. That implies you basically used 1.5B for a few years of additional training data, a huge price.

maybe I’m bad at math but paying >5% of your capital raised for a single fine doesn’t seem great from a business perspective

It's VC money, I don't think anyone believes it's real money

If it weren't, why are we taking it as legal tender? I certainly wouldn't mind being paid in VC money

Yeah it does, cost of materials is way more than that if they were building something physical like a new widget or something. Same idea, they paid for their raw materials.

If it allowed them to move faster than their completion, I imagine management would consider it money well spent. They are expected to spend absurd amounts of money to get ahead. They were never expected to spend money efficiently if it meant taking additional months/years to get results.

Someone here commented saying they claimed they did not even use it for training, so apparently it was useless.

In that case, this was one of the most expensive no-ops in history.

If they are going to be making Billions in net income every year going forward, as many years as analysts can make projections for, and using these works allowed them to GTM faster/quicker/gain advantage against competitors, then it is quite great from a business prospective.

The money they don't pay out in settlements goes to Nvidia.

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