Comment by aurareturn
18 days ago
The actual money is coming from big tech profits, debt, and rapidly growing AI revenue (Anthropic growing from $9b ARR to $60b+ ARR in a few months). A very small percentage is coming from Nvidia.
And before someone tells me AI demand is fake and circular, my company is spending thousands on Anthropic a month, up from $0 in 2025. And no, we're not getting scammed by Anthropic or tokenmaxxing for no reason. We are getting value. At minimum, my company is not part of this circular thing.
> my company is spending thousands on Anthropic a month
The problem is that this is simply not enough. They need you to spend tens of thousands, probably closer to hundreds of thousands, before the numbers start making sense.
> At minimum, my company is not part of this circular thing.
You're in the blast radius. And if you don't have a plan for "what if Anthropic hikes the API rates by 10x or worse", you're in the kill zone.
Anthropic just made a profit. So it does seem to be enough.
Anthropic and OAI are both looking for 1T valuations. Anthropic is projected* to make $500mil operating profit off 10bil annualized revenue. They need to grow these numbers 10-50x more for the valuation they're seeking to make sense.
Tough pill to swallow given they lack a moat and their compute is being subsidized by the companies they lease it from, all of which are INVESTED in Anthropic and have a desire for their growth story to look good because when they IPO it gives those same investors a better shot at making their money back.
That's the circular aspect of this whole scheme. Nobody makes their money back if the LLM company valuations get more realistic.
What value?
I’m at a very fast growing startup with real revenue and Fable has let us avoid hiring probably 6-10 full time software engineers with full salary and benefits. We’re spending nowhere close to that. I’m the hiring manager and I’m closing the reqs.
So.. great news for Anthropic, I’ll go ahead and let the elephant in the room go unaddressed
6-10 engineers for a startup seems suspect. Is this some sort of web app where there would be lots of training data? I’m not a web developer so I don’t know what else to call it besides web app or SaaS or whatever it’s called in that world.
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