Anthropic's IPO Prospectus Is a Fucking Doozy
daringfireball.net
daringfireball.net
It's wild that this is an accurate summation of their position here. It's equally wild that a company building and selling a technology as actually useful as an LLM - yes, I think they're useful, sue me - can't begin to think about how to make money with one.
I agree with the article - they'd better hope they are messianic super geniuses, because if not, they're gonna seem real stupid when we have all moved in in a few years. The technology will stay, but that doesn't mean they will.
I wonder where the split between self-hosted LLMs (w new more powerful LLM hardware) and hosted LLMs (big iron from an LLM-provider or at your office) will fall. Will there be a future for both? LLMs and other ML tools just with different levels of capability? etc.
They've convinced every company in the country, including in previously security or compliance-centric environments (finance, medical, government), to hand them hyper-sensitive data.
We've already seen the leakage scenario, with the academics who found the labs scooping them on the research they were using the LLMs to assist. What's to say they-- or someone who infiltrated their infrastructure-- won't do the same thing with your propriatery business details?
I'm not sure open LLMs are a great play for commodity vendors. A lot of "lowest bidder commodity services" work because they can wildly oversell. That VPS hosting a small-biz website or 1000-messages-a-week internal email can run on a Raspberry Pi 1B, so you can pretty easily sublet a $1000 server to 50 customers at $10 per month each. Current LLM hardware plays tend to need more expensive gear and seem to be running at higher utilization rates, so the price that actually fits the underlying business might not look as appealing.
Just look at palanetirs forward deployed engineers for how that'll start.
Maybe it could if they stop crippling it so much
(Opus 5.5 thought a user was trying to hack it because their prompt contained the word "reasoning")
It sounds remarkable, and I didn't believe it at first. But after more reading, I am convinced an influential part of Anthropic leadership really is something like a religious movement
The favorite I was not involved in, was when they spent many months (at least 3, maaaaybe more than 6?) working on a thing, with verbal promises on the other side, but then the owner of the business that kept promising to sign a contract once we got to a certain point died and at that point the whole thing got quietly killed.
Again, not my project; the ones I was involved in (different product,) at least half of which did materialize but most of them never made up the volume for the pain of the work, either on the dev side or the business side [0].
[0] - My favorite was when we did an integration with Tesla. they decided to use a VIN as the primary key for their salesforce integration. So, if a customer got an inspection on a trade-in, waited, then decided to try again... oops!
We were supposed to make it all up on being able to hard-sell the user on addons and multi-pack buys.
The way they calculate that is, last month's revenue x 12.
The leaked numbers are old.
1. What happens to your existing hardware investments when NVidia releases new hardware that allows buyers to run the same models at a fraction of the cost in energy times? IMHO performance-per-Watt is going to be the only significant metric here. Yes, your existing hardware will still work but efficiency is going to be the name of the game;
2. How are you going to deal with the threat of open weight models that can be run locally and/or or cloud GPU infrastructure? We already have relatively affordable hardware (ie Mac Studios) that can run models as large as 500B-1T parameters with 3-4 bit quantization. That's only going to get better; and
3. The only use cases for AI really are:
a) Raising prices;
b) Cutting costs, particularly labor; and
c) Military applications such as targeting and autonomous drone and missile operation.
A society where even 20% of people end up unemployed is one that catastrophically fails.
American zeitgeist.
Anthropic's IPO prospectus shows AI vision, surging costs
I mean, if you’re gonna aim big may as well go all out. Next week OpenAI will claim to transform the global economy more than life itself.
All horseshit, of course. Still haven’t found a benefit to AI in my work or personal life. I hope the crash is a doozy.