We have like a dozen different LLM tools available to us and it's as easy as clicking on a dropdown to switch in every single one of them, and we have several thousand employees. Self-hosting with the cheaper OSS models is also becoming more and more attractive for larger orgs.

> Switching LLM providers as a company is not, once all your employees have it integrated with GitHub, their IDE, etc.

I'm not so sure about this. I guess it depends on how well people did their job there.

Ideally, whatever people built is loosely coupled to that third-party resource, meaning that switching cost will stay low.

After all, it's probably just prompts + an API layer. Unless one micro-optimizes their prompts for claude (which then breaks once a new checkpoint drops, hence is a bad idea regardless), pointing them towards a different API endpoint should be doable.

Working for a 10k+ corporate and we made it pretty easy to switch to any provider, people here can use Anthropic's, OpenAI's, and our own self-hosted open weight models very easily. It's one drop-down or `/` command away to switch between them.

I think other companies are probably doing the same, the moat of a AWS/GCP/Azure is much deeper with how contrived it is to migrate between them even if you abstract as much as possible with something like Kubernetes.

VS code or other ides with multiple providers makes it pretty easy.

Also for larger companies like Amazon the danger is they replace Anthropic completely with self-hosted models.

It’s literally a menu in Copilot.

The model is just some REST endpoint you switch out even in a lot of enterprise setups.

Integrations with Github and IDE are nothing. It's like changing your email software.

Switching LLM providers as a company is even easier than a solo developer, most large companies I know are using AWS Bedrock and selecting another model is basically just a checkbox for them

What?

Have you used Copilot at a company?

I can literally change my model in 3 seconds.

The moat is as shallow as it gets. Investing in a single LLM provider at the moment would be a mistake.

The biggest moat with applications like MS Office is compatibility. Sharing a slide deck or spreadsheet with others is a simple decision, you know they have it or have software that can read/write it.

I don't get the need to have Anthropic build their custom versions of MS Office apps, I can tell Claude to generate a word doc from a wiki page and it does a pretty damn good job. Anthropic's statistical median level of software that they had Claude create isn't going to replace Office apps to the point where companies cancel/stop renewing their MS Office subscriptions/licenses.

The other element is trust. Do end users trust their data in Anthropic's systems? A lot of people get creeped out when they search for content from one device in their household and then nearly instantaneously they start seeing ads from other devices on the same topic. How creepy will AI get if it starts consuming all your docs, spreadsheets, personal finance info, emails, etc.?

End-user software is going to be under a lot of pressure. If you're Microsoft, Apple, or Google: you can easily copy products or integrate ideas into their platform. I see companies like Adobe, Salesforce, and Oracle having to downsize significantly to stay profitable. Having said that, my in-laws still pay for an AOL email so I don't think their cashflow is going to zero soon.

now imagine that said customer/competitors have been uploading/generating their source code, problem reports, marketing collateral, and other IP _to the LLM company_ for the last few years.

Yes, that's the direction I've been witnessing for Claude too. But it's a short to middle-term strategy IMO, by the time companies are ready to drop all these apps they will need something else entirely, not Claude's slides or spreadsheets or Salesforce.

The fact that Frontier AI can become Google Workspace at a flip of a switch is what is crazy valuable. Anthropic and OpenAI can enter and disrupt any market, especially software, faster than any company ever could, because users want the flow to start and end in their chat interfaces.

> Meanwhile, Google and Microsoft, which already dominate that area, seem to be dormant.

Google owns 15% of Anthropic I think.

And Google offers Argon 4 to paying Workspace and Google One customers now. How's what was the number 1 model on nearly every single bench a few weeks ago being "dormant"?

I know people all in in the Google ecosystem (getting credits from Android phones they buy etc.) who only swear by the Google models and who are now using Argon 4: I asked them and a few days ago they had access (but they were already using other Google models before that).

Doesn't GMail have billions account by now?

I'd tend to say with billions of users on GMail and a model like Argon and 15% of the Anthropic shares, Google is not where you think it is.

This is equally true for how risky it is to build such a business on top of a 3rd party black box. Model nerfing is widely speculated and the only true way to guarantee that the models you're using are stable and consistent is to run your own hardware. Not to mention the recent Navier-Stokes controversy.

The moment you find a money-making formula on top of someone else's black box model, there's nothing stopping them from taking it for themselves.

SaaS have vendor lock-in, they have your data hostage and whar importantly your habits: other software never gonna be 100% the same.

Changing LLM backend on other hand takes 2 seconds.

And it's not all or nothing: you can just keep anthropic $20 plan for planning and do 99% code generation with chinese model.

That "someone else" is just shifting from a single open source maintainer to an LLM.

the answer is to use a gateway that all the prompts go through. There are many proprietary and open source solutions for this. You get the benefit of making it trivial to switch between proprietary providers in case you are unhappy with the performance or squeezed on price. The AI Gateways put cap on LLM providers' margin upside.

Additionally, the gateway allows for caching, additional security checks, centralized monitoring. I think most corporations have a multi-provider setup anyway.

You pay a service provider, who manages the open models… there is absolutely nothing special about it. The hardware can be something you own. Or you rent. Or you just pay the service provider to access the open model apis. Lots of options here, it’s not different from pretty much any other software service in the corporate world

What do you mean? We use Bedrock at our company and I can switch to literally any model, including the open ones, by just typing /model and picking it, even including inside Claude Code. It's ridiculously easy to switch, and imho GLM 5.3 is good enough for 99% of my daily tasks already.

Isn't that exactly how Linux companies are making money?

Good luck in calling Anthropic support...

I'm fascinated by exactly how an investment in the company that first reaches AGI (or whatever we decide to call it) might pay off... It feels like the stocks would absolutely be worth owning in the immediate term because they'd be hot property at the point where people realise it's happening.

The thing that I'm less clear on is, if and when they achieve some kind of recursive improvement exponential growth thingy, isn't that going to heavily disrupt the entire economy / stock market? In that environment, would Anthropic's stocks really be a good bet, given they have to operate within the economy?

> It feels like people are still trying to bet on the horse that will achieve gAI.

I think that at this point gAI is just a marketing blurb, and the actual race is to dominate current practical applications involving basic RAG and ReAct loops. This can go from anything between software development, business intelligence, and market research. A company whose top brass can use a team of agents to do what nowadays they assign to mid- and top-level management is an executive with tighter control over the whole business process. For this you don't need gAI.

I've noticed they've actually stopped harping on about this AGI nonsense, I suppose because no one was buying it to begin with and they themselves didn't really have any idea wtf they were talking about when talking about "AGI". Now it's all about a bajillion agents running autonomously or whatever

“It ain’t that kind of movie, kid”

They make it up on volume.

> (assuming they're true and measured accurately).

Precisely, because TTM doesn't tell the full story about the potential shifts in quality of the work. I don't refer to vibeslop here, to be precise, just the additional followup work required on those features released faster, which always happens but with AI it may or not happen more often.

Just echoing what another comment said: it’s rarely a good idea in the long run to buy an IPO. Not financial advice. It’s one of those things where if you have to ask how to do it, you probably aren’t wealthy enough to be speculating at this level.

Would you buy a gaming console for a high price from a company that’s never shipped a gaming console? Maybe, but you’d wait til it’s been reviewed by someone else on YouTube or something.

I have tried a couple of IPOs

You indicate your interest. Also start funding the account. So you fund 7000 for 100 shares at 70. Then they announce the price is 75. You must change the order to fit the funds or have extra money. Of course you can opt out or change the quantity anyways. But I think in both the cases I actually went ahead (Reddit and figma), I had to reconfirm the quantity. You can't be away from the network.

You commit to your broker before, if you're big enough of a player. They'll mostly have allocated to their biggest clients and such.

Pretty hard to get in on a hot IPO, though, as the shares will go to their favorite clients (those with the most money).

I just 'bought' some through ing-diba, you can set a limit.

You don't need a broker. Use Saxobank or similar.

I don't know about the IPO specifically but it's only retail that has limitations for some US listings. And custodian banks/brokers offering products to retail.

The biggest one in the EU being the "No KID, no deal" (for funds, derivatives, etc.): no Key Information Document, then cannot be offered to retail.

That is unless retail is an accredited investor (say a letter from a bank saying you have more than 1m EUR in investments): then it can trade/invest in everything.

Or for example if you own a company (say private weath management) that's non-custodian (say you manage your wealth using your own company, and shares of your company are privately owned) and you're considered a professional in the finance world, you can ask your broker to let you trade / invest in basically every single product under the sun.

AFAIK pre-IPO stocks are just as vanilla as regular stocks and do not need the KID notice.

In addition to that Anthropic (in the EU), says you can enter pre-IPO using Revolut, Trade Republic, eToro or using bigger players like Saxo or IBKR.

Dunno why GP doesn't have access to it in Poland.

And you then have to agree to not share anything in it with anyone outside the UK, including:

> I will not transmit or otherwise send any of the information to which this gateway gives access to any person outside the United Kingdom.

It's extremely hard with modern browsers to ensure that doesn't happen!

I feel like the saying "Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent" has applied my entire life; I have yet to see the stock market behave rationally in my lifetime.

Stock market is a casino with positive expected value.

Horrible business, hmmm, so it's revenue has grown 10x every year since inception, what is a good business to you if that is deemed 'Horrible'.

To profit from shorting it you need to not just be right that it is going to go down, but be able to tolerate the volatility in the interim.

If you have to ask, then you shouldn’t short it.

If you view that as an investment then no. If you view it as a minor flutter then maybe. You might believe that Team X will win the next game (maybe at a 60% chance) but unless you're a degenerate gambler you wouldn't bet heavily on that outcome.

As the late Charlie Munger said about Tesla: I wouldn't own it, I wouldn't short it.

Shorting the leading AI company during the AI revolution?

Reminds me when HN was saying NVIDIA is a good short 3 years ago, supposedly it was "in a bubble", because it's stock prices was as if it had 10x the revenue it had in back then. Plot twist: today NVIDIA revenue is 10x the revenue from 2023, so it turns out the stock was priced exactly right back then, because the stock market is forward looking.

I wouldn't short it, it's likely to ruin you similar to what happened to the Tesla shorts. I would hold off to see if their earnings look good then go all in with 100-1 leverage. /s

This is a little bit cheeky, but basically yeah.

Venture investment is limited to people who can demonstrably afford to take on the level of risk inherent to the market they're investing in. If you can't comfortably afford for the entirety of your venture investment to go to zero, you can't afford to invest in venture.

The exclusion criteria aren't perfect, (accredited investor designation is somewhat coarse-grained) but they're relatively reasonable.

Increasingly these days, it seems if a VC backed company was profitable it would never IPO.

Why would they want to share profits?

In these companies, the shares *are* the product. Just like on social media *you* are the product, not the content.

When people say Inference is subsidised, they obviously don't talk about the company itself being profitable. To be fair, I included training costs also.

How do you know that?

It's shocking to me how narrow minded and short-sighted people are - not extrapolating out correctly to understand infinity tied to abundance:

There will essentially be no profit - as the cost per unit is practically $0, for SI work and then also physical reality construction with adding AI to autonomous robotics.

That technically means everything practically moves towards becoming free for everyone, and then it is a matter of attention with intention honing aim.

But most importantly that is freeing up people's time because systems that can become super highly efficient and super highly monitored-oversight by all, will then allow us to with care-being careful and continuing to pay appropriate attention to core-fundamental systems for survival, stability, harmony, peace, and necessary healing practices-processes - as part of growing pains, raising strong families, etc.

So then yes, Dario's efforts - save for attempts by whatever bad actors think they have a chance agains God and God's will, I hope readers have a relationship and knowing, not simply a belief, of God - will undoubtedly lead to not only stopping blatant slave labour conditions but also subtle incognito slave states that most of the world are under without realizing it being happy slaves working for the status quo machine that's currently attempting to pull us all into a highly destructive and highly profitable WW3 - where money is to be made on the unrest, on the mass murder, mass displacement, on the sales of weapons and defense, on the sales of reconstruction - in hopes of perpetuating forever wars.

Who you give your money - your buying power, your vote to through economic means - and who you give your attention to, your vote through alignment-direction driving processes - is what matters now:

You made such a comment about conflict minerals - but have you even started utilizing AI-SI to begin designing the solution, if so, where's that solution for others to take a look at and hopefully contribute to to improve in a crowdsourced manner-effort?

Looking at your website - you seem like a cool dude (?) - I'd argue you have some blocks that once cleared will help you expand further.

P.S. Set and setting are very important when taking any entheogen(s) - and until you are familiar with what's necessary to hold a safe-healing-fun space, it's best to only partake with a therapy type or highly experienced who is there consciously as a caretaker or in a group ceremonial type setting.

They can choose to become profitable... temporarily. They need to continue investing in R&D just to keep up with competition

My guess would be lots of money.

What do you think it would take to cure all cancers, and what capabilities do you think AI will have within the next decade? Need I remind you that, in the span of five years, AI went from not being able to add to solving Millenium Prize problems?

What would it take for AI to not replicate that in biology? Either curing cancer has to be a much harder problem, which is doubtful given targeted treatments like immunotherapy humans have already stumbled across, or AI progress has to slow down massively, which is doubtful given all the trends say it is speeding up.

They likely will once they are public, though it's surprising it is tolerated even at this phase.

Then again orange man president and SpaceX is saying some pretty bonkers stuff.

With Anthropic's IPO (and I was looking forward for OpenAI as well) there should be some hope for some rationality to come back into the sector.

If the bubble bursts, better now than much later. The industry stance that's been ongoing "AI, at all costs" has been such a market and economic pressure on the everyday worker that even a small value deflation I deem necessary.

Nobody is buying these companies because they believe that the company is valuable. They are buying these stocks because they believe that the stock may be more valuable tomorrow than it is today. Whatever the company behind the stock does or does not do, really doesn't matter. AI glitters like gold today.

Yet to be seen if it tarnishes.

>"If Anthropic is the first to AGI, it'll take over every industry and go to the moon!"

Meanwhile the hyper advanced software company's shitty electron app still flickers so bad on a high refresh monitor that it should require an epilepsy warning. I'll never understand the love for Anthropic, they legitimately have the worst software I have used outside of Microsoft.

Sure, and if it isn’t, investors just flushed a freight train loaded with dollar bills down the world’s largest toilet.

The real number with standard accounting rules is a loss of $567 million (-3% operating margin). But they're adding in "Stock-based compensation expense" (~$1B) and "Non-cash charitable contributions" (~$2B), and they end up with a profit of $2.5 billion.

> But running models yourself might be something you don't have expertise with, you need GPU ready DC, hardware, a new/diffferent team, quality assurances etc.

Absolutely nothing stops Microsoft/Amazon/Open Router( with partners) from hosting the Chinese models. As far as I can tell this is already the case.

This establishes a defacto price cap on what Anthropic and Open AI can charge. If you’re a heavy user blowing past 400$ a month self hosting becomes economical. A Mac Studio with 128GB of ram is about 6k.

Every day local tools are getting better, the OSX ecosystem here is exceptional.

You do have a point with frontier models, but most of the time you don’t need frontier models.

If I knew for sure I’d short Anthropic and retire early.

https://github.com/mlabonne/llm-course

Buy a laptop with some RAM, and a decent GPU, install llama.cpp, or Ollama, or whatever you go, get a harness, you're off to the races.

One thing Doctorow suggests is to remove anti-circumvention, thus allowing adversarial interoperability.

The solution is mostly not to go public. Valve is a good example of this.

Do well enough that you don't need outside investors, or if you take on outside investors select them carefully and ensure they don't expect an IPO.

Competition Enforcement

Strong privacy laws

Tech unionization

Mandated data portability.

I was redirected to https://ipo.anthropic.com/au/ for the Australian offering

I’m in Japan, and I get redirected to the …/jp/ page in Japanese. Deleting the …/jp/ doesn’t work; the Japanese URL just reloads. I also tried the Firefox VPN for several countries, but connection to the site was refused.

I wonder if there is some legal requirement that an IPO in Japan has to be presented with Japan-specific content? The securities companies listed on the page served to me are all Japanese: Mizuho, SBI Securities, etc.