ThenElection
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User ID: 622
It depends on what you consider Anthropic's market.
In 1999, Amazon was priced at 18x Barnes and Noble, which was the market leader in bookstores. Even after the bust, it was 3x Barnes and Noble. Investors speculated that it would be able to break into the broader market. And it did, as we know now but was uncertain at the time.
For Anthropic, right now its proven market is in coding. And if you assume that it will be the undisputed leader but only in the relatively small market of coding assistance, it's wildly overvalued, even at $1T. But if you instead see it as the potential market leader in the market of all intellectual labor (or even labor in general), it's wildly undervalued (mod the other risks I mention in a sibling comment).
I agree the gap between book retailer and general retailer is smaller than the gap between coding and all intellectual labor, though the payoff of closing that gap is also much, much bigger.
Well, at the time, Amazon was literally just a bookstore; it had brick and mortar competitors that offered what was universally considered an inferior product (Amazon offered free shipping, better prices, easy returns, etc, and was willing to throw away piles of money to establish itself). Whether it could sustain itself was unknown; an oracle who knew that it would become what it is today would have made a killing.
I'd say Anthropic faces three risks:
- AI failing to offering value to the broader economy outside of narrow cases like coding.
- Value generated being distributed throughout the broader economy or to upstream bottlenecks, not the model developers.
- Value accruing to a model developer, but it being OAI/GOOG/someone else.
I guess there's also 4) the government nationalizes the winning lab(s).
In a world where all those resolve in Anthropic's favor, Anthropic isn't the next Google; it's 100x Google. In a world where 1) doesn't, Anthropic's value rounds to zero, if not negative. 2) and 3) are matters of degree and imply a much larger pie to split, but they are unfavorable (e.g. even if OAI and ANT split the market down the middle, there's less pricing power, and it ultimately means Anthropic getting much less than 50% of the Anthropic monopoly scenario and the broader economy getting much more).
ThenElection
16hr ago
At the point where they would have proven RSI can create the kind of economic value they're imagining, the share price would be far higher than what it is now. It's like investing in Amazon in 1997: it took almost a decade for them to show they could make e-commerce profitable, as opposed to being a pets.com but for books.
It's risky and speculative, but if someone believes the market undervalues the potential business model, you want to get in before the market catches up.
ThenElection
16hr ago
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.
I'm not sure this is a con, in terms of shareholder value (I don't love Anthropic taking over the light cone, but in the meantime there's a lot of money to be made). The founders are ASI-pilled; the general market is clearly not. And if I'm investing in Anthropic (which I likely am), I want it to be a pure ASI bet. The founders will pursue that relentlessly, to the point of bankruptcy. If shareholders had a say, you'd have some guy at a pension fund who knows nothing about AI contributing to governance, possibly resulting in a strategy that is incoherent and doomed to failure.
I would be curious what studies have been done on how governance affects share price, profits, etc, though even if they showed weak shareholder power led to worse outcomes it probably wouldn't change my opinion on the AI lab case.
ThenElection
2d ago
helping with a filesystem being developed, which is also written in Rust
Might I ask: bcachefs? Been following it for years, very saddened by the Kent/Linus drama.
ThenElection
2d ago
I've come around somewhat on AI code and have come to accept that while the code is shit slop, it mostly works.
Ironically, despite being wildly bullish on LLMs compared to you, I've become more skeptical of AI coding since moving to a team a couple months ago that's extremely AI coding focused (think dozens of people, each contributing many thousands of lines of code daily, all code reviews done via AI, as well as deployments, monitoring, design docs; a guy from OAI came in and is implementing his vision). Fairly sure we're headed toward disaster, though our "velocity" makes leadership very happy.
ThenElection
5d ago
There must be some kind of natural experiment that could distinguish the effects of those socialization styles. I'm almost certain that the former style has a bigger influence in society: social hierarchy and sexual competition are massive drivers of behavior.
ThenElection
5d ago
And of course never argue with a woman. Took me so long to learn that.
Never argue with someone whose defense of something they did is "all feelings are valid."
ThenElection
7d ago
Corruption can be negotiated with. True believers are who you have to worry about.
Which class Newsom and the CDP fall into left as an exercise for the reader.
ThenElection
7d ago
California will rise again: it's the land of Reagan and the shining glory of American capitalism. LA moderates fended off a challenge from a Bernie associated socialist for mayor; SF's moderate mayor got his slate of policies and preferred candidates elected. Wealth tax defeated and banned for the future. Some bad with the good, of course, but it's a better direction than Oregon or Washington. (Republicans should go for accomplished tech CEOs as a governor candidate instead of people like Tory refugee Hilton.)
ThenElection
8d ago
E.g. from Scott Wiener (likely replacing Pelosi) and his SB 1047:
- Mandatory safety classifiers
- Mandatory predeployment assessments
- Kill switch
- Whistleblower protections
- Compute KYC
Just a start (and Newsom vetoed it), but it can be the basis for future legislation as AI continues to rise in salience.
ThenElection
8d ago
Some fun results from Mississippi Senate (97% in):
Scott Colom Dem 462,779 48.9%
Cindy Hyde‑Smith GOP 462,751 48.9%
ThenElection
8d ago
It's more likely we will get meaningful federal AI regulations, though likely two parts datacenter water regulation for every one part meaningful.
ThenElection
8d ago
Impeachment probabilities require the hyperreals to express numbers that close to 1.
ThenElection
8d ago
Democrats will shift back to that mode shortly, if they ever left it. Lucky for them, with no power, voters were happy to ignore them and ascribe the bread and butter failings to the ruling Republicans.
ThenElection
8d ago
when we have such a recent example of a Democrat-controlled federal government actively making the problem worse just a few years ago.
And notably, they got their asses kicked because of those problems. As it turns out, voters care about the economy and affording their lifestyles. Who'd have thunk it?
ThenElection
8d ago
"Your experiences are fake; I have numbers proving that you are actually doing great, and if you're not, you're a loser." Even if that were true, it's not exactly a winning message.
ThenElection
8d ago
Kind of. But even Trump's killer ad in 2024 was powerful not because of trans issues in isolation, but because he pretty clearly portrayed that Democrats cared about stupid shit instead of voters' actual concerns. In this election, the greater glory of Israel was the stupid shit that was getting in the way of parents' driving their kids to school (where they might be transed, but that's a step or two into the future, which is too much extrapolation for the average voter).
ThenElection
8d ago
There's a graph floating around of gas prices as compared to Republican (dis)approval ratings. It seems to be pretty indicative of a relationship.
ThenElection
8d ago
What are you talking about? I've been informed here on a weekly basis that we had achieved a TOTAL VICTORY over Iran and gas prices were imaginary.
ThenElection
8d ago
I guess all the "voters are stupid for caring about gas prices or a wrecked economy, destroying Iran is for our eternal glory!" talk does not actually win elections for Republicans.
Hopefully Republicans overcome their Israel fetish.
ThenElection
8d ago
They get to elect a non-voting representative.
ThenElection
8d ago
$1,000,000,000 voter information system the GOP built under Ronda Romney which couldn't even flag GOP registered voters who hadn't voted yet.
NGP-VAN on the Dem side could do that 15 years ago (I helped write some of the code for that). Sigh.
Makes me feel like I should go help even things out, but wherever the money is going, it's not going to the regular workers.
ThenElection
8d ago
GOTV is hard and costly, but it also requires upfront investment. Dumping more money into GOTV a couple weeks before the election would probably cost four figures per marginal vote. It's smarter to build persistent organizations that seem "wasteful" in off-election years but allow effective scaling of GOTV during the election time, but it's tricky to do right. Are you sustaining and building institutional capacity, or giving handouts to a mass class of grifters? Are those even really different things?
Dumping money into crappy ads late in the game isn't an especially efficient way to spend the money, but it's likely nevertheless the most efficient way to spend the money.
But if the jobs are all invented, how do we decide who gets the better fake invented jobs and who gets the worse ones? It's not a new problem, but at least now there is some semblance of an escape valve for people who don't like the fake job allocation process. (This is less a reason it can't happen and more a reason it'll be shitty.)
I wonder if we'll even realize the jobs are all fake. One person's fake job is another person's critical function to protect consumers/users. One plausible transition isn't some Great Fake Jobs Act of 2035 but instead the government finding it has a lot more funding and a lot more interception points in the economy and passing laws to take advantage of its new capabilities. Probably better psychologically for people than a complete lack of structure.
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