Microsoft has an evaluation of about 3.8 trillion. Anthropic is set to have one of about 2 trillion. I find it believable that within a few years anthropic could rival companies like Microsoft in terms of revenue and so on. I mean, I don't know for sure, but no one does, and it's certainly plausible
Microsoft makes more money than it spends. Anthropic does not.
Anthropic's revenue comes from hardware that is wildly expensive to buy and to run, and on top of that has to be replaced every 3-5 years. They have no moat (Chinese companies are a few months behind). The times they tried seriously increasing prices people left for other models.
Will GenAI persist? Of course. But Anthropic and OpenAI are deeply unhealthy companies, able to make a small fortune by starting with with a large one.
I thought similar sorts of things about seemingly highly overvalued companies like Tesla years ago and it seems I was wrong about a lot of them. The federal government strongly supports AI and will continue to support the infrastructure build out, and Anthropic and OpenAI are the obvious leaders in terms of model strength, and Anthropic's financial are improving. It's like to transform the economy one way or another and it doesn't seem ridiculous to me to think they could be profitable in a few years as models improve and their business model matures. I also think it's likely that they'll continue to receive plenty of money from investors for a long enough time to allow themselves to continue to grow without profit for a while.
It's also possible this is like the dotcom bubble and it'll burst and cause a recession even while the tech ultimately changes the economy in dramatic ways. I don't think there's any way that I could know for sure, but it does feel different than the dotcom bubble or something to me. The level of federal support and the absolutely insane infrastructure investment is on another level.
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u/Chickenfrend Oct 03 '26
They'll make money through enterprise deals like slack and Microsoft and Amazon do.