Anthropic's growth just flattened

bananaflag

Anyway the growth this year is incredulous!

bakugo

I think all numbers coming out of Anthropic are utterly meaningless until we can answer the question of "just how subsidized are those subscriptions?"

stingrae

I feel like a lot of this could be explained by how good Opus 5.5 is compared to Fable. People don’t need Fable for most tasks.

modeless

Opus 5.5 came out right at the end of the quarter, September 22. I'm confident that it caused more usage growth since then. I'm sure there are a lot of people rooting for their IPO to fail but they are still clearly in the lead on coding and will continue to do well until someone definitively passes them.

matt3210

They'll be competing on price now with openAI, google, and Amazon eventually. AI is just a compute commodity with a value add.

hokkos

And what is between June and September?

paxy

You can tell how desperate an argument is by how many derivatives they are using.

dzonga

my simplified take is the headwind is on two ends - smaller models being sufficient enough & open weight models then second utility of 'a.i' is maximal when deployed with humans i.e engineers applying a.i on top of current applications putting an agent layer on top. the second part is not sexy - but we see all a.i labs having fde arms e.g ode, microsoft frontier company etc but then again that's the part you can't hype.

rwaksmunski

As an investor, what's the moat here? Being 6 months ahead of China's open source/weight models?

this_user

AI growth is unlikely to be linear. We have seen a lot of hype in the last 12-18 month that give us ideas like "tokenmaxxing". But this is the same cycle that we have been before: hype -> disillusionment -> someone figures out a better way to use it -> next hype phase starts. As it stands, even the people closest to this technology have barely figured out how to use it effectively.

kubb

It's fun to note that nobody mentions AGI in these threads anymore.

rsalus

The conclusion that this is a bubble seems arbitrary and disconnected from the several true facts outlined in the article. Anthropic's growth _is_ slowing, albeit still strong at ~47%. They do have enormous compute obligations, and it will require a lot of growth to meet them. However, they also increased revenue per dollar spent on compute from $0.40 to $2.08 in five quarters and hold $131.7bn in cash. Keep in mind this growth has mostly been sustained by low-level business automations, coding, and chatbots. With the adoption of products like personal agents, e.g., Meta's Muse, I am pretty optimistic there will be demand and growth around this level will be sustained for a few quarters. Doubtful we will ever see another ~150% growth quarter.

obblekk

OpenAI's Astra released on Sept 3 and Opus 5.5 released on Sept 22. Most likely the combined revenue growth continued just as fast, but OpenAI took a lot of market share with a model that's ~as good. If true, then the current market sentiment is too pessimistic because demand for AI (and chips) has continued growing.

foxfired

- Would you like to get paid a million dollars right now, or get paid a penny today that doubles everyday for 30 days. - hmmm, why 30 days? Make it 60 days and I'll take the penny. The effort needed to double everyday, or month is realistic at first. But then you can't just keep doubling without swallowing the universe along the way.

l9o

I think one thing that could explain it is that some of the big tech companies might have been big customers of theirs, and now they have alternatives that, according to recent news, their employees are being pushed to use instead. Some of those reports mentioned internal usage getting cut in half. If this is true, it doesn't necessarily mean their growth has stalled. Discussed here a few weeks ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49997161

lbrito

Zitron has been saying this for weeks. EDIT: okay, not months, weeks. Feels like forever.

WarmWash

The real question is how many people haven't figured out how to use AI to make their job easier/more productive. Especially with this latest crop of models, they seem to be pretty damn competent in classic engineering rather than just software engineering.

tyroneschiff

I thought growth has slowed due to crackdown on distillation

MisterMunchkin

Everyone is really tightening usage now because of all the slopmaxers who burned millions of dollars of tokens and achieved nothing.

ls612

If you ever wonder why Anthropic is going all out to try and fearmonger their way to an open weights ban, this graph will provide all the answer you need.