That's now between an entire Instagram and WhatsApp acquisition cost.

It's hard to escape the conclusion this is dumb money jumping on a bandwagon. To justify the expected returns here requires someone to make a transformer like leap again, and that doesn't take spending huge amounts in one place, but funding a lot more speculative thinkers.

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xpe 3 days ago | parent [-]

I don’t like to think of predicting the future as “a conclusion” of some assumptions. I don’t think it puts you in a frame of mind such that you’re genuinely curious.

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fidotron 3 days ago | parent [-]

> Remember the YouTube acquisition? To many, it seemed bonkers.

Because of the legal uncertainty about what they were doing. There was no fundamental technological impediment.

Here the technology simply doesn't exist and this is a giant bet that it can be magically created by throwing (a lot) more money at the existing idea. This is why it's "dumb money" because they don't seem to understand the dynamics of what they're investing in.

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xpe 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

Update: I edited my comment to focus on the mindset of making predictions (including recognizing the uncertainty and being comprehensive about possible scenarios)

I made a new top-level comment mentioning the 2006 YouTube acquisition only to show that many people were shocked, but -surprise- markets are usually better predictors than individual hunches.

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fidotron 3 days ago | parent [-]

This isn't a market in that sense though - it's very much one sided what Anthropic tells us and they are privately traded.

It is very far from a situation where the price discovery mechanism is allowed to work.

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xpe 2 days ago | parent [-]

Here are some ways that it’s not very far from a market mechanism:

1. How much an organization is willing to invest in X competes against other market opportunities.

2. The effective price per share (as part of the latest round of financing) is an implicit negotiation.

It is a matter of degree, sure, but my point still stands: there is a lot of collective information going into this valuation. So an individual should be intellectually humble relative to that. How many people have more information than even an imperfect market-derived quantity?

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fidotron 2 days ago | parent [-]

> there is a lot of collective information going into this valuation

No, there isn't. For example, I would like to legally bet against Anthropic existing as a going concern in five years. Where can I do this? All the information against them is discarded and hidden.

	▲	xpe 2 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		You misunderstand what I mean by “collective”. If you are charitable, the meaning is easy to see. “Collective” as I used it does not mean that everything or every person gets factored in.
	▲	xpe 2 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Rather than getting sidetracked, I will repeat the central point and question to you again: > How many people have more information than even an imperfect market-derived quantity? I’ll restate the point because I don’t think you’re understanding what I mean. Do you think this funding round was irrational from the point of view of the investors? If so, how can you make such a claim? Do you have information they do not? It is possible you have some bit of knowledge they don’t, but on balance it is unlikely that you are operating from a position of having more relevant information.

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utyop22 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Yep people skip over the history re YT - the battles fought re. copyright and broadcasters and so on.

Sure it was overcome, but not because of YT or Google, but because of external forces causing those people fighting it to converge on hosting their content on the platform.