Anthropic Is Preparing for IPO and We Should Be Worried

Forgeties79

VC’s weren’t going to keep them propped up forever and it’s not like any of these companies have even a semblance of a plan to get into the black, so unfortunately this was always going to be the next stage for any LLM start up not bought out and folded in to a big player.

cmiles8

It’s going to be an interesting period ahead. The market is going to struggle to absorb SpaceX, OpenAI, Anthropic and others. They’re just massive relative to typical IPOs. Maybe one can sneak through but not all. Someone is going to have to have a very bad day and it’s not clear who yet. Separately there’s a big battle to keep these folks out of the S&P index, because many funds (some of whom are required to buy index stocks) think they’re horribly over valued and will tank once floating. Get your popcorn ready.

alex1138

I like Claude a lot. I hope it continues to be good

fabian2k

I think it's a good thing if the pricing gets more realistic. Both for the customers long-term and for the economy. To evaluate AI tools and how much benefit they provide you need to evaluate the costs as well. And right now nobody truly knows where the costs will end up. That's fine as long as the prices are stable, but they aren't. In one example I know, a boring company that isn't a pure software company, the Github Copilot pricing change will make it around 15x as expensive as before. It's far from ideal when you cannot rely on pricing to stay somewhat stable.

afavour

I hope price increases will mean we see serious moves towards open source and/or on device models. Feels like that's where we should all be headed but the current subsidy is a distraction.

rvz

After Anthropic achieve's "safe" AGI (A Giant IPO). Those token prices are NOT going down as I am predicting [0] Why would they? They need to pay for the increasing costs and the high demand for running Claude and soon it will be reflected in their earnings releases. So every token cost counts and the subsidization era of tokens will eventually end. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46886918

this_user

Anthropic have clearly been working towards this since last year when they started focussing more on building products around their models that could be monetised, instead of competing on the most advanced chatbot. IMO this is part of a broader strategy on their part to tap into the enterprise market, because that is where the money is, not in selling subsidised subscriptions to consumers. This is also what the market will want to see: a credible path towards profitability.

the__alchemist

JCBP; some way to short this!

mrbonner

That just means there will be legitimate ways to short them.

swader999

It will be just fine to see other tools like opencode and pi and other models flourish as subscription benefits get increasingly nerfed.

surgical_fire

Of couse they are preparing for an IPO. They bleed ungodly amounts of money and have no path to approach something that resembles profitability. The next step of the grift is offloading this into the stock market so that the investors get the exit event. They will need a lot of bagholders this time around.

CharlieDigital

I have been sounding the alarm on my team that the current edict to go all-in and not plan features ( "we can just throw it away and rebuild it" ), not read code ( "the agents should do all the coding and review" ) is something that will end up being a medium term regret since there will be a day of reckoning with pricing. My sense is that these companies actively need the audience of developers to have their ability to read and write code atrophy and even stunt the growth of early- and mid-career engineers; create the dependency. It will be interesting to see how this works out because some parts of the equation should get better over time (better algos, better infra), but there are now billions of dollars of investment to recoup and it will continue to be an arms race that requires more money.

bilsbie

GOOD POINT by my wife: it’s too early in the AI cycle to already have winners especially with sky high valuations. It’s like betting on ibm to win the pc race.

bzmrgonz

Am I correct in thinking it's a race to who launches IPO now? I mean among the SOTA models. Especially since OpenAI has been given the all-clear by the court.

anshumankmr

X is happening and we should be worried (I mean I am not saying its not warranted but by god its like every article these days)