Their valuations differ by about 13%. That's close enough that I wouldn't call it "blown past".

Things change fast in this space. Anthropic had a big boost from having the premier coding model for a while, but GPT-5.5 has closed that gap at a time when a lot of Anthropic customers are looking for cheaper alternatives.

Anthropic is coming off of a recent change to their enterprise billing that substantially changed the pricing for many users. They were smart to do the fundraising before the effects of that change could fully propagate.

Anthropic is at the mercy of 3rd party datacenter contracts. AFAIK OpenAI will soon run mostly on on their own GPUs.

I don't like Altman and I am still upset about his memory deal last year but he prepared for the current shortages months before anybody else. Meanwhile, Anthropic seems to lack any plans besides third party contracting. IMHO they got very lucky with xAI and Google having spare capacity and willing to rent it. But what about next year?

Anthropic is riding a hype wave as a result of brilliant marketing. OpenAI has the better products, higher reliability and better community relations. I don't expect the situation to continue.

OpenAI isn't shaky or vulnerable, this market will need at least 2 players.

I see most of the surge here comes FOMO AI spending which will have to be dialed down later half of the year, otherwise those companies will have to layoff to fund their AI bill, which is harmful to their business.

Anthropic grabs its bag at the peak, but feast is over.

Having used Codex though I don’t think OpenAI needs to worry. It’s a solid product and they will share the market.

Anthropic is the Google to OpenAI's Yahoo.

I wonder if being consistently candid is a superior business strategy?

This business and financial race is probably the craziest in human history, so zig-zags are expected. One company may take advantage on one curve while another is stuck in the pits.

How? OpenAI and Antrophic are basically the Big 2 racing away at light speed; the others who can't get near them are perhaps shaky & vulnerable. And sure, there's a garden full of those.

I’m not so sure. We only need to look at Uber’s example of companies realizing they’re spending way too much and trying to rein it in. Claude has excellent revenue but it is highly dependent on very rich technology companies continuing to spend lavishly without seeing returns. The music will stop at some point and Anthropic will be hit the hardest. OpenAI may have less revenue but it is distributed across many, many more customers and use cases, it’s resilient. And even if Anthropic do, somehow, manage to keep their customers spending huge amounts on Claude, they’re very vulnerable to being undercut by OpenAI given codex is pretty much at parity. Anthropic seems more vulnerable to me.

“Caballo que alcanza, gana”

Effectively infinite. Databricks is a good example. They're still private after 13 years and closed a Series L round last year. Stripe is similar.

Having been through an IPO before, it was good for employee liquidity, but bad for the culture and long-term success of the company.

I believe the canonical example is Databricks on round L

I imagine there are ways for existing investors to achieve liquidity while still raising venture funding. But an IPO is "the" liquidity event and I imagine there will be pressure from investors for that.

I also imagine that venture funding rounds have a lower ceiling than the public markets - but at these rounds I'm not so sure!

Once they reach series Z does it go back to A or do we get a new format like AA, AB ?

usually you would go through seed funding, the series a,b, and possibly a1 and b1. If you entered c or d territory it meant that you still had a chance but vc would be following you very closely. After d, you could raise money, but it would be under very unfavorable conditions

Depends on the investors if they see growth. The downside is dilution. Preferably they just want the Series I as the IPO in this case.

They cannot raise forever, SpaceX has done more rounds but the timing is most important.

Yes, whatever you like

they can do as many as they want. but at some point investors need/want to exit their positions and push for an IPO. That point is different for every company.

Yeup, no shortage of tech IPOs over the past five years that are now valued at like 5% of what they were after being dumped onto the market: ZoomInfo, Bumble, Gemini

And many more that are 50% of what they were: Snowflake, Coinbase

And many more that went back to private companies and then were sold off: Carbon Black, etc...

I'm actually too lazy to go list out all of them.

But employees, beware, of those gnarly lockup periods post IPO where all the better classed options than yours get to exit.

Often only minimal shares are floated on the public market - 5-10% now is not unusual. Also, founders keep priority shares to keep the company.

So IPO is not particularly a liquidity event for investors as much as a valuation/pricing event. Indeed, the tech IPO's that have done the worst were the ones where shareholders wanted liquidity.

Clearly none of the multi-trillion dollar companies could find a buyer now if they really needed to sell themselves, so they're not really "worth" that much. (Nor are their founders, who can't sell their shares without tanking the stock.)

So these stocks are more like derivatives: a way to bet on the future where betting volume is huge relative to the underlying asset.

> But that isn't what it is anymore, it's a dumping ground.

We got "dumped" Google and Facebook, so... Those probably made up for all the other "dumps".

We also got "dumped" TSLA, which is meme-ing in the trillions at the moment.

You can short Anthropic at IPO if you want...

> Venture capitalists & private investors are sucking all of the possible growth and future upside from these companies and then dumping them on retail investors when there's nothing left.

A lot of the money that is deployed by VCs comes from pension funds and asset managers that ultimately manage money for the average Joe.

If they could have gone public, they probably would have. I hope they do, their S1 might be good meme material.

Companies that reached a level of maturity where going public make sense don't keep doing funding rounds to cover the rate at which they bleed money.

Hasn't SpaceX achieved that though?

And Saudi Aramco before they IPO'd

Kibicorn has a nicer ring to it ($1,024 billion).

Don't worry, it will be all dumped on the SP 500 as soon as it is at its hype peak.

Anthropic is one of the few companies that will likely hit an infinite valuation if they succeed in their mission.

Well presumably nobody investing in this current round expects anything less than a 3x

inflation

I suspect we'll have our first $10T company in the next 2-3 years. That's only doubling.

There was a secondary sale in April.

great point. i haven't gotten over losing the Uber subsidy!

The circulation of money in AI is deeply troubling (NVIDIA being one of the worst I believe), either the bubble doesn’t pop and corruption like this is considered legal (self-inflating money amongst friends) or it pops and the financial hurt will be felt for a decade.

Anyone in finance should know that excel doesn't run out of letters (for columns) either. It just rolls over to AA, AB, etc.

Unless you have access to Anthropics book your claim is as baseless as Ed Zitron's ...

*run-rate revenue

Without more information, this number is impossible to interpret.

With all that revenue, while being the most expensive model, they are still unprofitable without trickery.

This really doesn't paint the good picture you seem to imply.

What do they then need another $65B for? To sell 200$ plans that cost them 1000$ to fullfill.

I can have $47B in revenue if I sell something that cost $80B to produce ez pz.

you also can't write openai without a pen

Airtight logic

I think your conclusion might be right that AGI does just feel a bunch of hype but the reasoning in middle feels flawed...

like how 13^2=169 and 31^2=961 or 10^2+11^2+12^2=13^2+14^2

9k karma, whew