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Anthropic IPO predictions? Anthropic will be IPO'ing next week. At first it was supposed to be $2 trillion, then it collapsed all the way down to $1.1 trillion, but now I see $1.5 trillion and I bet it's higher.
I will probably try to get an allocation and then flip it immediately. Long term, I'm bullish on the frontier labs but with high variance. I can easily see a 90% decline or a 1000% increase within 3 years.
Bearish takes:
Horrible governance. Shareholders have no voting power and few rights. You are subordinate to the founders (51% voting rights), to the foundation, and to humanity in general. Even if Anthropic takes over the light cone, it will never pay a dividend.
Revenue growth has slowed. The H1 revenue growth was probably a one time thing due to token-maxxing. Will be much harder from now on and other models are "good enough" for most tasks.
Employees will be looking to cash out after IPO lockups expire.
Will the hyperscalers kneecap Anthropic? Quite possibly. Anthropic is openly competing with everyone. Why should Google, Amazon, or SpaceX rent them space? Good chance that Google and Amazon dump shares then stop renting. Elon in particular can pull the plug on their compute with 90 day notice.
If they are successful, they will be nationalized.
I would be shocked if China doesn't steal their weights. I wouldn't be surprised if they already have.
Bullish takes.
The big one. Recursive self-improvement leads to them dominating all industries. Somehow they get there before OpenAI/Google/SpaceX and the advantages compound.
People will ignore the horrible governance. It won't matter until it does and by then it won't matter. Look how long Snapchat was able to coast on the worst governance of all time (worst until now, lol).
I find investing on this weird. It's essentially investing in Theranos because they said they can tell diseases from a single drop of blood. They never proved they could, and none of the frontiers have even proven an inkling that RSI is possible, let along that it can be applied across a wide distribution of industries at a cheaper cost than skilled humans. It's investing in hype and dreams. I think any investment in frontier IPO should not depend on the speculation of what they could figure out but on the business case for what they can do and shown improvement in being able to do now.
Why wouldn't RSI be possible? Of course it's possible. The most accurate predictors rate it not only possible, but likely, and soon.
That doesn't mean that Anthropic will be "winner" of AI or that shareholders will make any money of course.
By what scientific or engineering evidence have you seen of it doing so? Lot of hypers think it's possible and soon but do they have any research to point to it being the case? The theorize it to be the case, but that's a theory on faith not evidence.
Keep in mind that the current "theory" on AI is "Moore's law for AI via Data". That is completely at odds with the RSI theory unless that RSI is creating additional synthetic data that actually beats the sim-data distribution problem.
I'm not sure what you're even asking. You want a research paper that says its possible for AI to develop an AI that is more capable than itself? Are you asking for like an official statement or a mathematical proof or something? You want 100% certainty?
Its self-evident that AI's are becoming more and more capable, tackling longer term tasks without human intervention, and now even solving problems which humans are incapable of. Furthermore, all of this progress falls along a trajectory which has been predicted for years by the same people who also predicted RSI.
RSI is already here. AI's are already heavily involved in the design of AI systems. There are still humans in the loop, but the human contribution gets smaller as a percentage with each generation. All that is missing is the final step removing humans from the design entirely.
The magical thinking is that AI progress will suddenly stop now even though it has substantial runway to advance by scaling alone if nothing else.
That is not at all self-evident. I have seen no such increase in capability, and I still consider LLMs to be poorly suited for the programming world despite the continued hype.
I'm at a big tech company grasping at the frontier.
For the past, I don't know, six months, code review has been mostly a waste of time. Agents look at commit summaries and detect if the stated intent is actually achieved in the code. They check for bugs, style, and anything that a project maintainer might care about that has been shoved into a nearby markdown file. This system is so good now that most of my changes don't actually require another engineer to review them, they can be AI-approved and shipped.
I'm recently on a project where that's not completely the case, but it's the kind of project you'd point to when arguing that actually leetcode problems really are relevant to some jobs. But even then the agents still almost never make a mistake, likely they're doing better than the humans.
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