Comment by timr
2 days ago
It’s become a reddit meme that this is the WeWork IPO redux, but that’s fairly obviously ridiculous.
WeWork was renting cubicles and calling it technology.
Whatever you think about this market, the LLM technology is real, obviously important, and Anthropic is the market leader. The only similarity is that they’re both famous and well-funded.
Anthropic is renting GPUs and calling it technology.
Sure, they have some flashy models, harnesses, and tooling around it, but their competition isn't that far behind - and some of that competition is 100% free. Their moat is closer to a puddle, to the point that there are entire companies built around the concept of dynamically routing requests either to them or their competitors.
Anthropic is the market leader in a rapidly-evolving market, where customers can and will jump ship the second a competitor's model looks shinier or cheaper.
> Anthropic is renting GPUs and calling it technology.
While you can imitate the style of my response by ignoring all of the technical details, you've still ignored all of the details.
WeWork was not a technology company. Anthropic is. You even admit it, but you want to hide your actual argument ("the technology is a commodity") behind an irrelevant rhetorical flourish.
It's fine to argue that Anthropic's business is bad. You don't need to make a ridiculous, unsuitable metaphor on top of it.
But "Anthropic is a technology company" isn't enough to claim that their IPO valuation is reasonable.
The problem with WeWork's IPO wasn't that they aren't a tech company. It's that they didn't have a good enough business model.
AFAICT, the only one who cares about whether Anthropic, or WeWork, is a technology company, is you.
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