I don't see how Anthropic can become profitable enough to justify its investments unless they can either stop training models ("Pace the Frontier!!1"), or magically eliminate open source competition so that their volume x margin on inference is high enough to dwarf the training costs.

For the IPO, I assume they're going to try to get everyone to focus on inference - which is profitable in isolation. But I don't know how they'll distract the market from the other half of the equation.

New Constructs takes a similar position on all mega IPOs. Sometimes they're right, but sometimes they're wrong. For example, they insisted Uber's IPO valuation was too high due to unsustainable losses, hidden liabilities, etc. Initially they were proved right when the post-IPO stock price plummeted, but in the long term Uber has performed well, become very profitable, and now trades well above its IPO valuation.

I'm expecting a similar story to play out with Anthropic: The stock price will come down significantly after the IPO, resulting in lots of headlines about the AI bubble bursting. But in the long term it'll climb up again and investors who stick around will do very well.

Maybe the portion of Anthropic that produces Opus/Sonnet can be spun out for us devs at a reasonable valuation?

Keep all the Mythos/Projects/etc. hype/feature-creep crap in some other entity and value that at $5 tn or something if you wish.