AI Startup Anthropic Raising Funding Valuing it at $60 Billion (wsj.com)
(Tuesday January 07, 2025 @05:40PM (msmash)
from the music-continues dept.)
- Reference: 0175846797
- News link: https://slashdot.org/story/25/01/07/1820244/ai-startup-anthropic-raising-funding-valuing-it-at-60-billion
- Source link: https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/ai-startup-anthropic-raising-funding-valuing-it-at-60-billion-19d0605a?st=pyyfFo&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink
Anthropic is in advanced talks to raise $2 billion dollars in a deal that would [1]value it at $60 billion , making it the latest artificial-intelligence startup to seize upon investor euphoria for the technology. WSJ:
> The funding round is being led by the venture firm Lightspeed Venture Partners, people familiar with the matter said. The $60 billion valuation includes the money Anthropic plans to raise in the round.
>
> The deal would make Anthropic the fifth-most valuable U.S. startup after SpaceX, OpenAI, Stripe and Databricks, according to data provider CB Insights. It was valued last year at $18 billion in a round led by Menlo Ventures. There has been a dealmaking frenzy among AI companies since OpenAI raised $6.6 billion in an October round that nearly doubled its value to $157 billion. Two other startups, Elon Musk's xAI and Perplexity, subsequently raised money at substantially increased valuations.
[1] https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/ai-startup-anthropic-raising-funding-valuing-it-at-60-billion-19d0605a?st=pyyfFo&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink
> The funding round is being led by the venture firm Lightspeed Venture Partners, people familiar with the matter said. The $60 billion valuation includes the money Anthropic plans to raise in the round.
>
> The deal would make Anthropic the fifth-most valuable U.S. startup after SpaceX, OpenAI, Stripe and Databricks, according to data provider CB Insights. It was valued last year at $18 billion in a round led by Menlo Ventures. There has been a dealmaking frenzy among AI companies since OpenAI raised $6.6 billion in an October round that nearly doubled its value to $157 billion. Two other startups, Elon Musk's xAI and Perplexity, subsequently raised money at substantially increased valuations.
[1] https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/ai-startup-anthropic-raising-funding-valuing-it-at-60-billion-19d0605a?st=pyyfFo&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink
Always giving money to fads (Score:2)
by xack ( 5304745 )
Never to solve poverty.
About solving poverty (Score:1)
by gewalker ( 57809 )
Basic needs include food, water, shelter, energy, health care.
So invest in technologies that promote significant improvements in delivering technologies like these affordably to all instead of the few.
If you like fads, you can even invest in fusion energy and cover both bases.
Imagine if there was a thing like AI (Score:2)
Anthropic is yet another worthless joiner on the wagon of "our LLMs seem to be intelligence."
$60 Billion? They're not worth one billion. It's like bitcoin only slightly less speculative gambling.
Disagree? Write it down. Here. Tell me I'm wrong, and let's come back January 7th 2025 and see what nobody-AI is worth, not Anthropic, not openai, not sam altman, nobody.
Re: Imagine if there was a thing like AI (Score:1)
I disagree, 24hrs is too narrow a windkw
Re: (Score:2)
In the Chinese calendar it's the year of the snake, but I keep writing year of the dragon on my checks.
Re: (Score:2)
OK, I'll take that bet, I think OpenAI will still be worth billions a year from now.
However, the WSJ using the words "frenzy" and "euphoria" certainly are expressing a 'healthy skepticism,' to say the least.
I actually would guess that NVidia will have one of the biggest collapses. Not because they will lose the lead or stop selling billions in chips, but their valuation now is SO high that absolutely incredible revenue would be needed to justify it. And now they're talking about robotics as their grow
Re: (Score:2)
> OK, I'll take that bet, I think OpenAI will still be worth billions a year from now.
Maybe, maybe not. The lack of actually profitable applications gets harder and harder to gloss over.
> However, the WSJ using the words "frenzy" and "euphoria" certainly are expressing a 'healthy skepticism,' to say the least.
You are too kind.
> I actually would guess that NVidia will have one of the biggest collapses. Not because they will lose the lead or stop selling billions in chips, but their valuation now is SO high that absolutely incredible revenue would be needed to justify it. And now they're talking about robotics as their growth area, which tells me they may be running out of headroom to grow in AI infrastructure itself. Branching out rarely works. You almost have to try, but lightning seldom strikes twice.
Indeed. The bubble is inflated about as much as possible.
Re: (Score:2)
> You almost have to try, but lightning seldom strikes twice.
And really it did strike twice for nvidia - they were big winners in crypto mining as well.
Re: (Score:2)
I agree with you about NVidia. All the Crypto guys were using GPUs for Crypto, and as such those guys went over to AI and LLMs and took their love of GPUs with them. NVidia happened to be in the right place at the right time.
Assuming the AI hype cycle continues for a few more years though, for NVidia to stay dominant they need an AI specific chip and they have to be first. GPUs are a square peg that happens to fit in the AI round hole, but they aren't perfect; they're just better than general CPUs fo
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You are not wrong. And it is quite possible Anthropic actually has negative worth.
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Claude is actually useful though. People are using it to increase their productivity. Just consider if you could release a product that could increase productivity by 1% across a large number of industries how valuable that would be
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Claude is extremely impressive, and very useful for my work. It takes a lot to impress me, but Claude does it where ChatGPT does not. For some types of tasks, it saves me oodles of boring drudgery. I wrote a Rust commandline util, and then it became obvious that it would be very useful to have that wrapped in egui. I know egui. I've written a decent amount of egui. But ... why would I? Boring.
"Claude, turn this 400 line rust command line util into an egui app"
3 minutes later, done, and as well or better tha
Re: (Score:2)
I have to admit, Claude is useful. We've tested ChatGPT and Copilot and Claude for basic programming functionality, things we need done but aren't super value-add, and Claude was the best performer for us by far (today, that may change in 6 months). So it depends on what you want to do, but for our needs Claude worked quite well for programming and documenting what it coded.
Re: (Score:2)
This chicken may yet come home to roost. If they get this $2B on a $60B valuation, they better be able to actually be worth $60B or more by the time they need more money or they're absolutely fucked.
This is the problem with these eye-watering valuations - if you can't actually measure up, your next funding round will be a "down round" that nobody is going to want a piece of, and your current investors are not going to like the devaluation of their existing investment because they got took for $2B.
This is h