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At the point where they would have proven RSI can create the kind of economic value they're imagining, the share price would be far higher than what it is now. It's like investing in Amazon in 1997: it took almost a decade for them to show they could make e-commerce profitable, as opposed to being a pets.com but for books.
It's risky and speculative, but if someone believes the market undervalues the potential business model, you want to get in before the market catches up.
Amazon in 1997 was not priced as if it would be the highly profitable market leader. Anthropic already is, even though there is uncertainty as to whether they can actually make it there.
So the upside here seems a good deal smaller to me, unless Anthropic manages to take over every industry out there.
It depends on what you consider Anthropic's market.
In 1999, Amazon was priced at 18x Barnes and Noble, which was the market leader in bookstores. Even after the bust, it was 3x Barnes and Noble. Investors speculated that it would be able to break into the broader market. And it did, as we know now but was uncertain at the time.
For Anthropic, right now its proven market is in coding. And if you assume that it will be the undisputed leader but only in the relatively small market of coding assistance, it's wildly overvalued, even at $1T. But if you instead see it as the potential market leader in the market of all intellectual labor (or even labor in general), it's wildly undervalued (mod the other risks I mention in a sibling comment).
I agree the gap between book retailer and general retailer is smaller than the gap between coding and all intellectual labor, though the payoff of closing that gap is also much, much bigger.
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I agree in general that there is a risk, and it is fairly speculative. I suppose there are always options traders and gamblers of any sort. The difference it feels is that Amazon was on some level one-of-a-kind or were they not? What separated them from their other e-commerce competitors? I don't think Anthropic has that much of moat compared to their competitors, which i think is the bigger risk.
Well, at the time, Amazon was literally just a bookstore; it had brick and mortar competitors that offered what was universally considered an inferior product (Amazon offered free shipping, better prices, easy returns, etc, and was willing to throw away piles of money to establish itself). Whether it could sustain itself was unknown; an oracle who knew that it would become what it is today would have made a killing.
I'd say Anthropic faces three risks:
I guess there's also 4) the government nationalizes the winning lab(s).
In a world where all those resolve in Anthropic's favor, Anthropic isn't the next Google; it's 100x Google. In a world where 1) doesn't, Anthropic's value rounds to zero, if not negative. 2) and 3) are matters of degree and imply a much larger pie to split, but they are unfavorable (e.g. even if OAI and ANT split the market down the middle, there's less pricing power, and it ultimately means Anthropic getting much less than 50% of the Anthropic monopoly scenario and the broader economy getting much more).
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