Comment by spacebanana7
9 hours ago
Why not Anthropic? They’re a very rare company capable of charging $200 per month per seat level fee across the corporate workforce.
Yes their compute costs are astronomical, but that can be managed down over time by more efficiency or mild enshittification that doesn’t create too much churn.
> Why not Anthropic? They’re a very rare company capable of charging $200 per month per seat level fee across the corporate workforce.
Because no part of this statement is accurate. They’d like investors to believe it’s very rare but they have multiple strong competitors, most of whom have much better financials, and the entire sector is worried that the open models are going to effectively cap rates below what they need to pay off their massive investments. Lastly, they’re not universally must-have in software development which is one of the domains best suited for LLMs but most corporate work lacks similar correctness oracles and we’re already seeing major corporate customers reconsider the cost/benefit ratio.
None of that means they’re doomed but a lot of stars need to align for them to keep their valuation up. They don’t need to go out of business for investors to lose money buying in at the peak.
You would think you’re investing in a software technology company, but after reading a bit of news stories, you realize you’re quite literally funding war crimes. If I invested in an arms company, I’d have reasonable expectations about what I invest in. Investing in Anthropic at surface level looks like investing in software for hobbies and business.
It’s pretty depressing to be honest. I don’t know how I could work in any of these military industry companies.
Normally Danish pension companies and banks will refuse to invest your money in weapons manufactures (unless you have a lot of money, then they apparently don't care). But as long as your money is invested as a pool, they won't do weapons.
I think you're right that e.g. Anthropic wouldn't be on the block list, because: It's an IT company, and I suspect that even Palantir might make the cut. It is fairly annoying, because my pension fund won't invest in Rheinmetall, SAAB or Kongberg, which I think they should, but they will probably invest in Anthropic, OpenAI, and SpaceX, which I don't really like.
It’s probably quite similar here in Finland. I’m interested to see what the current fund(s) contain.
All major indices have always included defense contractors.
Also, when you buy into an index fund, you are not funding the companies that the index tracks. That’s a misunderstanding of how the markets and index funds work.
you seem to be implying that, secondary markets have no effect on primary market prices, and i just want to make sure that's what you meant.
>I don’t know how I could work in any of these military industry companies.
You'd sing a different song quite quickly once the threat stops being abstract as you don't get to free-ride on the security a defense industry provides.
The defence industry that would be required to prevent an invasion of the US mainland is at least an order of magnitude smaller than what currently exists to sustain the US empire.
I wouldn’t, but thanks for the reply. I’ve gone through conscription and we are neighbours with Russia. I’ve not lived a day in my life without existential military threat.
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Replace "war crimes" with "hardware" and it's an equally good reason not to invest.
They're valued like software companies, but they have terrible margins compared to software. Investors haven't figured out how to value these companies.
> you’re quite literally funding war crimes
What difference with Microsoft, amazon and google? They all heavily support the military.
(S)he said: "pulling my money from all of the US funds that I currently have".
Edit: OK, no the same person.
There is none. That’s why I wouldn’t invest in them either.
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Chinese hardware and energy headwinds aren't going to be great for Anthropic, apparently not even over a 1 year time horizon.
Because I don't really trust any of them, and I don't believe that the business is self-sustainable. At the moment we're in a phase where CTOs are able to withdraw money from the corporate bank accounts to be "on the cutting edge", but I don't think that's going to last. I'd rather have my money in something else.
Index funds adjust based on performance of the underlying stocks, so it doesn’t really matter if one of them does poorly. The index fund will adjust. When you buy an index fund like the S&P 500, you’re taking a position that the mega-caps it comprises as a whole will give you outsized returns over extended periods of time.
And they "only" need about 100 million recurring subscribers at $200 per month to make the profits that will justify their nearly $1 trillion valuation with almost no room for growth whatsoever, so who wouldn't want a chunk of that pie. (numbers calculated on back of imaginary envelope)