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Comment by xvector | Hacker News Reader

I am struggling with this because I have an Anthropic offer vs another equivalent offer that is all cash.

But project out forwards.

- What happens when Google builds a similar model? Or even Meta, as far behind as they are? They have more than Anthropic in cash flow to pour into these models.

- What happens when OSS is "enough" for most cases? Why would anyone pay 60% margins on inference?

What is Anthropic's moat? The UX is nice, but it can be copied. And other companies will have similarly intelligent models eventually. Margins will then be a race to the bottom, and the real winners will be GPU infra.

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If you have an offer, you can and should ask this question of whomever you're coordinating with. They will give you an honest answer.

If they outlast the competition it might be a really hard market to enter. Models are expensive to train, and they'll get outdated. You're on a time limit to make a profit off of it

Google and Meta might be the only real threats against this given how much cash they have and so far Meta is just flopping

I've been in this situation before. Anthropic has a stupid business model but the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent. If you get in there you will be aligned with people who structurally do not lose.

Big picture, sure. We can talk about the millions that corporations will make and who's going to do what. But you're a person. $1 million in options is probably meaningful for you. Companies aren't IPOing, but the secret is that they're still paying employees cash for their options. SpaceX employees have had what's called a tender, which means they get to sell some of their hypothetical SpaceX options for cold hard cash in the bank that you can use to pay your mortgage. There's zero guarantee that Anthropic will do such a thing before the bubble bursts, but if they do, and you're there, who cares about a software company moat when you have enough money to buy a castle in Napa and pay to have a real actual moat with water in it and crocodiles, if that's what you want.

Others are made of different stuff, and are going to go right back to work, even though they could go off to a beach for the rest of forever somewhere.

> who cares about a software company moat when you have enough money to buy a castle in Napa and pay to have a real actual moat with water in it and crocodiles, if that's what you want.

Doesn't this require their private market valuations to go well into the trillions?

It would have to be a small castle.

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