Consider that semiconductors are the worst case situation for a supply chain planner:
- most capital-intensive manufacturing process ever invented
- lead time for expansion is several years
- demand that is highly uncertain on a timescale of months
- technology that goes rapidly obsolete
Unless one of these factors changes, it essentially guarantees that semiconductors will have the highest price volatility of any manufactured goods. As they have since the 1980s.
This sub-thread wasn't about semiconductors though. It was for chilling plant. Semiconductors I do agree are a somewhat special case - but also one the US ceded it's capability in and largely offshored.
But it's way more than just chillers. It's everything from structural steel, to electrical transformers, copper cabling, optical transceivers, electric generation, skilled workforce in the trades, etc.
Overall this boom has been relatively tiny as far as US industrial booms historically have been, and we cannot ramp up production even if there was the political will to do so.
It's not just datacenters. Look at the military industrial supply chain these days. We can't even scale up WWII era artillery shell production in any reasonable timeframe. Much less modern weapons systems.
This will encourage developers to put these facilities in more human-friendly places. I knew the clock was ticking when xAI started expanding aggressively in suburban Memphis. These facilities are loud, they emit pollution (when power is generated onsite), and they need very little staff. After the initial construction there is zero upside for the local community. They should be located away from population centers.
more likely they'll get built in different countries with more lax regulations. This is probably going to end up like manufacturing where it's all done overseas.
Property taxes are a significant contributor to the purse of many cities and counties, and datacenters are expensive real estate in terms of the assessed valuations. Sales tax also.
For some cities and counties this will be a loss if those developments move.
In some states (Texas) data centers are getting significant tax breaks. I (in Texas) on the other hand have seen my property tax rise about 700% in the last 10 years.
I would take a wild guess that data centers have a pretty mediocre assessed value, and of course they have even less of an employment base than a typical warehouse or factory.
Not appreciably in most municipality so far, I guess what your saying is nice in theory but isn't being born out in reality in the simple majority of places.
The SEC's job isn't to adjudicate on whether Anthropic is a good or bad bet for investors. Its job is to ensure that investors have adequate visibility, and then get out of the way.
It would be VERY BAD if we gave politicians arbitrary veto power over who IPOs and who doesn't. The threat of corruption should be obvious.
The article suggests exactly that requiring to delay IPO until 2 consequent quarters of detailed financial audits will be available from Anthropic. Without that there is simply not enough information for an investor to make a rational choice.
It's a highly speculative investment in a company that, based on current trends, relies heavily on technology which doesn't exist yet and experts in the field aren't sure what it will be used for. It lost 42 billion dollars last year.
I'm not even going to say it is a bad investment, it might be a once in a lifetime opportunity. But if the current public information isn't enough to dissuade a buyer then that investor is sophisticated enough that they can wait 2 more quarters after the IPO before buying.
It kills me that I know their whole business is built on a false premise, but those who have never maintained software can't see it.
All that's really happening is that they're borrowing from a source of debt that's completely off the books: software quality debt.
That is the steel wall they are set up slam into at 100mph. Just because tech debt isn't on the books doesn't mean it isn't a force that can halt growth.
It'd be like if we passed 1 million new laws to regulate commerce. That's good for business right? The only thing better would be ten million new regulations
By all accounts, Anthropic has taken on an enormous amount of technical debt in Claude Code (and presumably its other software). What isn’t clear is whether this is actually a problem.
At normal startups, tech debt slams the brakes on product growth, but it takes a lot of years for it to happen. At Anthropic, they’re speed running tech debt, but they also have AI to help them navigate it. Will it be a problem? Don’t know, looking forward to finding out.
> The article suggests exactly that requiring to delay IPO until 2 consequent quarters of detailed financial audits will be available from Anthropic. Without that there is simply not enough information for an investor to make a rational choice.
I plan to invest a (relatively small) amount of money in Anthropic's IPO. The amount of money I plan to invest is so small (around 1–2% of my total portfolio), the downside is minimal – if it crashes to zero, I've lost 1–2%. I don't see how this is "irrational" for me to do–if I want to do it, the risk is something I'm aware of and can handle. I don't think two quarters of financial results is going to change anything, because I'm doing it based on vibes, not based on stock fundamental analysis.
You aren't the target for arguing the SEC should delay the IPO, it's for investment vehicles like pension funds that take down the whole economy if they crash.
Pension funds don’t even need to wait for IPOs to invest in companies, and they have actual investment experts on staff, so I don’t really think that’s a major worry.
> I don't see how this is "irrational" for me to do
And..
> because I'm doing it based on vibes, not based on stock fundamental analysis.
So it seems that you do agree that you're not acting rationally, but you're okay with that as its contained.
The thing is: if enough people do what you're planning to do, the market is basically broken. Early investors will be getting back healthy returns, based on making ludicrous investments in a very risky business that still hasn't been validated at all. Basically a Ponzi scheme.
With more data, analysts might be able to raise more severe warning flags, that might deter people like you from investing.
Or Anthropic might actually take over the entire economy, and holding its stock might be the only worthwhile economic activity left for us, mere humans. :-)
It's wild to me how quickly the term Ponzi scheme has devolved from its original meaning. I'm guessing it started happening around the time the stuff with Madoff came to light. People use the term basically as an insult now, trying to convey that the investment they're talking about is stupid, irrational, immoral, or some other negative value judgment. It should be obvious to people familiar with the term than an investment into Anthropic isn't a Ponzi scheme. So characterizing it as such leads to confusion among people who might not be that familiar with the term.
Ponzi scheme is a type of fraud in which the fraudster misrepresents whats happening with your money. Investments in stock market or crypto happen with knowledge of the risks and people buy and sell them freely. Maybe they feel similar to you because a Ponzi scheme is pretending to be an investment, which is the fraud part.
And rationality is defined as the opposite of whatever is doing things "on vibes" is. You said it yourself, you are going with the vibes on your investment instead of reasoning and logic. And with so little information as there is about Anthropic's IPO reasoning and logic to invest are hard to come by.
There's a distinction between theoretical reason–what it is rational to believe, what arguments one rationally ought to accept or reject; and practical reason–what it is rational to do. Logic is primarily about the former; choosing whether to invest in an IPO is primarily about the later. An action can be theoretically irrational if it is motivated by or involves the acceptance or promotion of irrational beliefs; but making a decision based on "vibes" isn't such a thing.
Have you ever heard the story of Buridan's ass? A perfectly rational donkey placed precisely midway between two bales of hay; it has no logical reason to prefer one to the other, so instead of picking one, it starves to death. That donkey was irrational, not through lack of logic, but through having too much of it. The donkey who picks which bale of hay to eat first based on vibes is more rational than the donkey which completely rejects vibe-based decision making.
I see where you are going. And I agree with the principle. I do not agree that it applies to invest in that IPO, thou. I do not see that investment as equidistant to all other options.
Consider this investment strategy: put most of your money in passive index fund ETFs (e.g. VOO), put a minority in a random selection of other things based on “vibes” - is that actually an “irrational” strategy?
I bought US$350 of stock in some random Australian microcap because my dad worked there in the 1980s. Worst case scenario I lose US$350. And I get to have some fun conversations with my dad. What’s irrational about that?
It is irrational if a crash will be correlated with other stocks. It is much better to invest 1-2% of funds into portfolio insurance than into Anthropic.
If the government shouldn’t press its thumb on the scale at the start (fair to argue!) then it shouldn’t press its thumb on the scale when they demand a bailout.
There is zero reason to bailout either. Force a sale of assets to a US-based company? Sure. But no need to bail out. The US has the first second and third best GPU companies and the best five AI companies. Unless they all go under simultaneously then I see zero incentive to bailout.
Primarily, other rich people - waiting keenly in the wings for the Buy Signal.
Because the nature of this whole thing is a cycle. The worst of it is that the consequences echo downwards until they hit social strata that can't handle any loss (because they have little). That's where the social cost really beds in, in the thousands and millions of ruined lives of ordinary people that are the collateral damage each time there's a failed round of the RL Investment Board Game funded by the world's wealthiest 10%.
Which proportionately affects those with large investments, removing growth that was speculative in the first place, meanwhile bailouts are paid by tax payers.
It also affects unionized firefighters and teachers with pensions.
If a multi-millionaire loses 50% of their net worth, they are still a multi-millionaire. When normal people lose 50% of their net worth, they have real problems.
Not arguing for a bailout, but the "it mainly hurts rich people" argument is pretty weak, and may actually be backward.
The hundreds of billions - in this case potentially trillion+ - of dollars not spent on bailing them out can be distributed to such pension funds instead, if that's truly the best avenue. These funds should already be very diversified in the firstly place.
Not bailing out absolutely primarily hurts rich people. This is trivial to ascertain from basic principles.
It does not depend on that definition. My first sentence explains why. Advocating for spending $1 trillion on bailouts means you're advocating for taking away $1 trillion from other purposes, and redirecting it to bailouts. You're not taking into account the "taking away" part and the hurt _that_ causes, while hyperfocusing on the hurt "prevented" by the bailouts. Both hurt; the former largely the wealthy, the latter largely the 99%.
What you're doing is like being scared of flying on commercial airplanes yet being fine with pitbulls and rottweilers. This is normal due to human psychology, but reality says the opposite.
Bailouts have been a wonderful tool in the 21st century. During 2008 crisis, there was an unbelievable high ROI to them, both in the $ value of investments in the banks and in the global economic catastrophe it prevented.
It's not as simple as just looking at the ROI of an individual bailout; what if the crisis itself only happened at the level it did because of the expectation of the bailout in the first place?
> Notably, the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission (FCIC), tasked by Congress with investigating the causes of the financial crisis, cited moral hazard as a component of the crisis, arguing that many factors, including deregulation in the derivatives market in 2000, reduced federal oversight, and the potential for government bailout of "too big to fail" institutions all played a role in increasing moral hazard in the years leading up to the collapse.
They also caused it by encouraging banks to make loans to people who couldn't afford to pay them back, to "promote home ownership".
The actual problem wasn't really regulatory, it was that they made a change to a complex system and nobody noticed what the implications were until it was already a Problem.
What happened was, mortgages were always considered safe loans, because if the borrower defaults then you repossess the house and sell it to recover the principal. Meanwhile banks would only make loans to people with good credit, because even if you can repossess the house, doesn't mean you want the trouble. So if you looked at the past, holding mortgages was a good investment.
Then they started allowing the banks to sell the mortgages to investors and for the investors to buy insurance against defaults. Which is fine if the investors/insurers are doing their homework and buying loans that are going to be paid back, but mortgages were considered safe, so they were basically not paying attention. There was a thing where they had some bundles of mortgages rated as AAA when they shouldn't have been, but that was more of a scapegoat for the institutional investors who should have known better to blame somebody else after things started going south.
The actual cause was this: Once the banks started selling mortgages to investors, they no longer cared if the borrower would pay it back, because now that's the investor's problem -- and the investors weren't paying attention. Meanwhile as soon as the bank sells the mortgage, they have the principal back from the investor and can go loan it out again and then sell that mortgage. And while this is happening the government is encouraging it because look at all of these new home owners. So now you have the banks giving mortgages to everybody regardless of creditworthiness, and that's what really caused it.
Because doing that creates a housing bubble, as all the people who can't actually afford a house can now bid up the prices by taking out a loan they won't be able to pay back. And the housing bubble in turn invalidates the assumption that if the borrower defaults you can recover the principal by repossessing the house, because now when the bubble pops, people end up underwater on their mortgages. The value of the house crashes and is now less than the loan principal. So when those borrowers start to default, the investors holding those mortgages and the insurers insuring them were lined up to get smashed. Oops.
I think you moved pretty quick past the part of why mortgages weren't safe.
Mortgages were given to people with no documentation allowed people to lie about their income and get loans they couldn't afford. That was alright because they had low introductory rates/payments they could afford. The market was getting more expensive and you could refinance to a better loan when you're LTV was more favorable before the balloon payments hit.
Those were the loans that were rated AAA.
Once the market growth slowed just enough to not allow the refinancing before the balloon payments, the defaults started, at first slowly then all at once.
If you're going to make a point of it then don't leave out the part about how it happened.
What they were doing was, they'd take a block of subprime mortgages and split them up into tiers. Basically they'd agree to wait to see who defaulted and then the top tiers would get all the mortgages people actually paid back and the bottom tiers got the ones they didn't. If 10% of the mortgages defaulted then anyone who bought at the 10th percentile tier gets all the defaults and everybody else gets paid. If 20% of them defaulted then the ones who bought the 20th percentile tier lose too, but the 30th percentile tier still gets paid.
The highest tiers were rated AAA, because for them to lose you'd have to have preposterously high default rates.
Then we started seeing preposterously high default rates.
That would be an excellent argument if the government were a for-profit enterprise. Since it's a government, the opportunity cost of what to spend money on at a critical moment in time when a lot of people are vulnerable seems like the better way to analyze the decision to me.
Although I'm sure this is mostly predicated on my political bias, I'm also reasonably confident that your analysis is as well. I'm not sure you're as aware of it though
The housing bailout also arguably worked extraordinarily well at preventing a much greater, prolonged loss / depression of value in real-estate. The largest bailout in world history went to US homeowners via the Fed de facto purchasing garbage mortgages to pull them off the market.
But isn’t that kicking the can down the road? Isn’t that the reason housing is incredibly over valued and wealth inequality is a huge problem here and around the world?
Yes, but "kicking the can down the road" has been the defining policy in most of the West for the last 60 years as it's what benefits the oligarchs. See, that metaphorical "can" here being kicked doesn't exist for them. It used to, but they rightly believed it wouldn't happen in their lifetime, and now it's locked in thanks to private drone armies if even the shadow of a "can" appears to be forming.
If we universally euthanize people once they reach a certain age and fail to pass certain capability tests, we'd also very likely see an ROI as the costs of maintaining the elderly and their increasing consumption could be put to more productive uses in the economy.
Still... something strikes me as just... well... morally wrong about that.
Ah, so we're redefining "pension" as a kind of "bailout" here? After all, if you think about it, isn't every healthcare intervention also a form of "bailout"? People's health should be allowed to succeed or fail without the moral hazard of bailouts!
(sarcasm marker, because there really are people who think like that)
Strong contender for most short-sighted comment I've read on HN. Second-order effects? Never heard of them! And if I did, they're all pure speculation anyway! And if they're not, they're much smaller than what was prevented! There was _no_ other option!
The people who "lost everything" were people who bought houses they couldn't afford by lying about their incomes. Counting on the bubble growing forever.
You are ignoring the many documented cases of predatory mortgage lenders encouraging elderly and otherwise infirm people to switch to the “lower rate mortgages”.
Acting like the only people who had these loan obligations were actively doing something wrong is a total myth.
Meanwhile Wells Fargo, who gave loans to dead people to meet quotas, was made whole and then fined a few token dollars.
The people who "didn't lose everything" were people who were lying about securities being AAA worthy while in reality being filled with subprime junk. Counting on getting bailed out and facing no consequences.
Subprime mortgages were subprime because there was no documentation given to prove incomes/debt of the people they were given to.
The people who defaulted on their mortgages did so because they couldn't afford them. The reason they got a loan that they couldn't afford was because they lied about either their income or their debts while getting the no-doc loans.
The failures in process that led yo the industry allowing people to lie to them without verification is another part of the story but it's completely dishonest to act like the people getting the loans they defaulted on had no agency.
"The reason they got a loan that they couldn't afford was because they lied about either their income or their debts while getting the no-doc loans."
No, they were offered loans at incredibly low rates that would be unaffordable if they rose at all. A large part of the scandal was about how the banks were offering loans to people that couldn't really afford them not that people were lying to get those loans.
This is basically correct, and should not be downvoted.
People forget why the retail banks were bailed out: because they're an essential service that is used on a daily basis! Imagine if you woke up one day and heard that Amazon was bankrupt, and therefore all AWS storage was going to be offline for 30+ days, and if a buyer could not be found the hard disks would be sold off at auction with no opportunity to retrieve your data.
And, yes, from this we can infer which tech companies are "too big to fail" and therefore would be bailed out if ever at risk of imminent bankruptcy and shutdown: the cloud companies. AWS, Google, Microsoft, and probably Cloudflare as well.
The Intel "bailout" was more like the General Motors one, good old fashioned manufacturing protectionism.
Americans should also note that almost all other countries with bank failures had comparable bailouts. A few exceptions: Iceland (failure of Kaupthing forced the UK government to bail out some local authorities who were banking with them!), and Cyprus ("bail in" with loss of money in high value accounts, basically because the EU deemed the country to be too deep in dodgy foreign money to be worth saving).
Why not? The government is allowed to destroy private enterprise as much as the government is allowed to destroy society. Just because you personally disagree with it doesn't mean society doesn't have the right to destroy companies they find to be damaging to society.
Destruction isn't the opposite of bail out, it's just destruction. The government is obligated to do what society wants. From this destruction would come creation by freeing up capital to do more productive things than waste money chasing fantasy rather than providing free school lunches or free university instead (you know the actual things that would generate economic value).
No, they have not. They have incentives to do so, but they are only obligated to follow the law and in the US, even that obligation is relaxed by a lot.
You are arguing against literally this because the idea of being ruled by democratic means may lead to democratic outcomes you do not want to partake in. For that I say you're free to start your own society while people are allowed to engage in creative destruction if they choose so.
Let's not act like the VC world is against creative destruction when it comes to enriching themselves, there's no reason why the public can't destroy things to benefit society either.
All the SPACS, the NKLA (truck rolling down a hill) stuff, GME/AMC, Zack Morris crypto pumpers, SAVA (fake Alzheimer's drug) and investigations of shorters was a total disgrace. Truly the golden age of fraud. I don't think we'll see a market that insane for another 20 years.
The SEC did adjudicate the SPAC era. If you think there was a crime that the SEC should pursue then lets discuss this but SPACs are a perfectly valid way to go public.
Everyone gets audited financials before the De-SPAC process occurs.
I'll admit in an earlier life I got suckered by Chamath's fast-talking, hyper-confident bluster. Dude was just a conman who got lucky. They say it's better to be lucky than smart.
Like I would ban controlling share classes. I guess there could be an exception if they had an aggressive conversion provision that turned them into normal shares as the company grew.
You also omit an important constituency in your formulation. Corporations are extended limited liability with the idea that it will benefit the public. The government absolutely should be taking steps to ensure that this is true.
You could but why stop there? I argue that enforcing the standards for compliance and transparency is one of the greatest levers. After that it’s on the market. You will never stop an individual from buying fools gold and in some sense it’s healthy for some to fail no matter how silly the investment was.
Any reason why? To be honest, they never sit well with me either, but not sure what my argument would be for banning them. All investors are well aware of what they're putting their money into.
I think it pairs with the limited liability. It just isn't good to give unaccountable power to anyone. So it isn't about the investors, its about not letting the thing exist.
Yeah, allow loans as appropriate, but stocks ("ownership") should come with voting power exactly proportional to their face value.
Otherwise you're subsidizing oligarchs by cutting investors off from kicking the board the next week if/after it's caught acting against the share holders.
Good thing you're not in charge with your communist attitude. If they kept controlling shares hidden from public, you'd had a point. Nobody is asking you to buy shares of companies with controlling shares.
The SEC would beg to differ with your first para. I imagine that "protect" involves "adjudication":
"Founded to help our country respond to the Great Depression, we’re the agency that protects investors from misconduct, promotes fairness & efficiency in the securities markets, and facilitates capital formation for those looking to hire, innovate, and grow."
I would certainly consider their "non-cancelable spending commitments" misconduct in their financial reporting obligations. The law doesn't seem to be on my side on that though. I don't have enough hubris to claim the law is wrong, but I don't think I'll retract my position either.
Can you explain your objection more? They have several sections of their S-1 dedicated to this, and it's been public knowledge for a while (the other big IPO this year had it as a pro), so I'm not sure what you mean by "misconduct in their financial reporting obligations"
They can have as many pages of explanation on it as they want, it doesn't address the fact that they need to be factored into headline numbers. It's the distinction between technical correctness and communicative correctness. It's like surprising and unusual clauses in contracts - those are invalid too if you aren't sufficiently upfront about it.
It's an IPO, the P is public. The information needs to be consumable by the public. The level of knowledge that can be expected of a random IPO stock buyer isn't the same as that of a VC or private fund.
And that's exactly where the SEC comes in. The 1930s went wrong enough, no point in doing a 2030s repeat.
> It's an IPO, the P is public. The information needs to be consumable by the public. The level of knowledge that can be expected of a random IPO stock buyer isn't the same as that of a VC or private fund.
I'd wager that the 95th percentile, and maybe the 99th percentile anthropic IPO participant, by volume, is a more sophisticated stock evaluator than either you or me.
It's a baked in poison pill. What that actually says is 'we're holding the economy for ransom, give us the money we want or the economy will crash and we've thrown the steering wheel out of the window'.
The only way to respond to that is to let them crash but then you have an even bigger problem: OpenAI will have an actual monopoly on frontier models in the West.
In all honesty, what are they going to do... raise prices?
Are we to believe the only reason they aren't making a profit is because of competitive pressure? Why would I believe they don't have the same structural issues as Anthropic? That should certainly be the base case assumption even if there wasn't so much evidence of the same kinds of deals and problems.
They have to raise prices and lower expenses or there's no advantage to being a monopoly. I don't think corporate customers will pay higher prices and I see no evidence that they're actually capable of lowering expenses.
They're welcome to stop training anytime and show us how efficient it is to do inference only.
That's assuming Anthropic ceases to exist rather than having to file for bankruptcy and sell off their assets to someone who continues to operate it as a business.
And that you couldn't subsequently do antitrust against OpenAI.
You mean like making up non-standard ARR calculations and not including your Q3 results in your initial S1 draft? Or you know hiding things in footnotes in the S1 so people don’t see the full math on your obligations?
> “Run-Rate Revenue” is an operating metric that refers to the estimated annualized value of our revenue-generating activity as of a measurement date, calculated as the sum of (i) our consumption-based fees during the trailing 28-day period ended on the measurement date, multiplied by 13, and (ii) our aggregate monthly subscription fees as of the measurement date, multiplied by 12. For purposes of calculating Run-Rate Revenue, consumption-based fees and subscription-based fees are derived from customer usage and active subscriptions.
28 days is 4 weeks, so you don't get fewer or more weekend days arbitrarily. Used very commonly in some industries for financial reporting and also dashboards for software engineers.
You don’t think day of the week matters for Anthropic’s usage numbers?
I don’t have a particular point of view on this but the people acting like this is weird or some big deal have clearly never spent much time with financial filings. There are much weirder scheduling things than this. Some companies split their reporting quarters up in unbalanced ways for instance.
If they make, say, 10x more on weekdays than weekends, using a 30 day month with two extra weekdays overestimates annual revenue since it translates to a year with 264 weekdays as opposed to 260.
Um what? You seem confused, they didn’t measure a year with 372 or even 364 days. They measured 28 days. And it’s almost a certainty that taking the average spend over the last 28 days and multiplying by 13 is higher than taking the average spend over the last 31 days and multiplying by 12. Especially if we believe their revenue growth numbers.
> it’s almost a certainty that taking the average spend over the last 28 days and multiplying by 13 is higher than taking the average spend over the last 31 days and multiplying by 12
This is generally true of any growing time series. If you don't want this look at the audited GAAP figures.
~All companies provide non-GAAP numbers alongside the standard ones, and amended S-1s are also extremely common. Neither of those is remotely indicative of anything nefarious
They report GAAP earnings, and explain why it is not the best method to understand their current performance. Do you think it is more meaningful to investors to use their convertible notes mark-to-market accounting and worry about a loss that represents "paying their investors what their shares are worth"?
Adjusted revenue figures are reported all the time for many different reasons, there is absolutely nothing special about this and I've not heard ANY financial analyst explain why GAAP is a better number here. You are salivating over a total nothing-burger.
Also, if you didn't hear, their Q3 results were spectacular and were included in an amendment today.
I'm not an Anthropic fan-boy and I won't be buying their offering but you've picked just about the two least relevant things in this offering to complain about.
The reasons to be skeptical of this offering is what is described in the TFA: Anthropic is committed to spending 900 billion on compute over the next decade and if they can only profitably employ 80% of that it will utterly ruin them. Dario is putting all the chips on number 12. If he is right though - and inference usage explode by 1000x Anthropic has so much scarce compute locked up that they will do very, very well.
It's mainly the FTC, but I think the SEC does enforce some rules on pyramid schemes etc. even if the operators of them aren't being misleading. Certain business models are ruled out.
Not that I think that applies here, just that they go beyond making sure everything has accurate filing and disclosure etc. and do have some mandate to look into the business models themselves in some cases.
Informed consent is informed consent. My point was that informed consent in general is becoming more rare, especially when its government agencies we are expecting to do the informing (the SEC in this case).
I point to the pandemic response as a recent example of where the government completely failed to inform the public of what was going on, what was known, and what was unknown.
Then what would you say to big boys and girls (i.e., the moneybags) getting into bed together and decide that the best for all the big boys and girls is to ensure that the public holds the bag – via obvious pathways of funds, pension, and retirement scehemes etc?
> gave politicians arbitrary veto power
:-) That ship has sailed for USA (at least for the time being and its trailing smoke is visible from far away)
> Gensler spent his entire time at the SEC doing exactly that type of adjudication
Wasn't his war against SPACs' limited financial disclosures and conflicts of interests, i.e. the way companies went public, versus against any issuer per se?
"it would be VERY BAD if we gave politician arbitrartty veto power over who IPOs and who doesn't."
Not clear to what this sentence refers
Is it suggesting the government agency in charge of approving regsitration statements is comprised of "politicans" with "arbitrary veto power"
That would be false
Is it suggesting that the submission argues for changing the laws of the United States to give "politicians arbitrary veto power over who IPOs and who doesn't"
That would also be false
Is it some sort of "straw man" argument
The comment (reply) seems to be arguing the same thing as the submmission. The reply argues the SEC's role is to ensure "adequate visibility". The submission argues the SEC should take an active role in ensuring such visibility with respect to Anthropic's registration
If one wants to argue against the crux of submission,^1 then this is not difficult. But that's not what this sentence is doing
1. That Anthropic's registration statement is materially deficient, i.e., incomplete or inaccurate. He cites 15 USC 77h{b) but he doesn't indicate where Anthripic's statement falls short of meeting 77g and 77aa. As I understand it, the remedies in 77h were initially created in response to fraud in sale of penny stocks and the registration of "blank check companies"
Further, 77h doesn't determine "who IPOs and who doesn't". It determines _when_ a company can "IPO", i.e., only after filing a complete and accurate registration statement. Nothing stops Anthropic from filing an amended statement. The IPO is only "blocked" temporarily; it's delayed
Adjudicating over public good is literally the point of the government. What are you talking about...? Do you think we live in a libertarian free market paradise?
Yes you are right, but government must act through law. That is, government can’t work by having a bunch of people ad hoc deciding how to use government power. It needs to work by deciding objective principles of operations, called laws, and then enacting those.
That’s why they call it “rule of law”
The simple explanation is that parents don't want to give their sons gender-ambiguous names, but are more open to it for daughters. This is consistent with all of the dynamics described in the article.
The economics of that don't work out. Government is a small market and can't drive frontier innovation at the scale it's happening today, let alone in the future.
Look at the defense industry: The Big 5 contractors (Boeing, RTX, General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman) capture most of the discretionary military budget, and the largest of them is in the $300B valuation range (Boeing, which has substantial non-government revenue). Fine businesses but nowhere near Anthropic's valuation.
Bottom line, the government doesn't have deep enough pockets.
I disagree. I think it does make sense the way it was described; top models for governments or industrial players with deep pockets, and "normal" models for the general public. None of the big 5 defense contractors sells directly to the wider public.
In fact, I'd assume this direction has been widely discussed and considered at Anthropic. I think Fable's release was an experiment to test this.
The biggest risks though are China and Moore's law. In the short term, if you don't offer a competitive model as the market grows, you fall behind in marketshare. Anthropic's edge is that it's offering is still better than Chinese offerings. If they offer anything less than that, something not better but just comparable for example, they lose on price. In the long term, as computing capacity continues to increase, local models potentially pose the same challenge.
So there's plenty of pressure for Anthropic to keep widely offering the best model they can.
Yeah, so long as China exists and wants to keep releasing open models, it's not feasible for Western labs to stop releasing frontier models to the people.
In many ways investing in a very late IPO like SpaceX, Anthropic, or OpenAI is the worst of all worlds for the public investor.
On the one hand you'll never see a 100x return – that's been captured by private equity. But there's still a lot of long-term risk because these companies haven't proven they can deliver free cash flow to justify their valuations. Investing in SpaceX or Anthropic at $1T valuation is very different from investing in Apple or Nvidia.
It’s not riskless, it’s just the benchmark that all active investors and their associated podcasters have to beat.
Active investors usually fall into the same fallacy where people all rate themselves as above average. Mathematically speaking a large portion of active investors have to do worse than average and simply stating FUD about averages won’t change that
I've been a continuous subscriber since the early 1980s.
The magazine's low point was the infamous op-ed in 2021 about E.O. Wilson a few days after the biologist's death. It was basically a woke hit piece accusing him of scientific racism and white supremacy, with no evidence from his body of writing. It also criticized the genetics community at large for the term "normal distribution", which it took as offensive for implying that anyone outside the peak is "abnormal". (Never mind that "normal" has a technical definition in statistics.)
It's improved a lot over the last few years.
Still, I fear it may soon go the way of BYTE. Not because the need isn't there or because the market is gone, but because people get information in such different ways now.
Democracy never handles situations well where one side of an issue is a small highly motivated group, and the other side is a larger group that kinda-cares.
It's the reason we subsidize farmers. It's the reason our tax code remains so complicated. It's also why it's hard to get anything built: Existing owners are highly motivated to block development, and the potential beneficiaries (people who might someday live there, etc.) are too diffuse to mount a defense against them.
Math is likely moving into a big science era, much like experimental particle physics and astronomy did before it.
Once AI mines the easy unsolved problems, it will take large token budgets to make meaningful advances. That will need to be funded and planned at a societal level, like the great facilities of the other big sciences.
Mathematics will become more like an observational science, with some mathematicians specialized in interpreting the results that come out of the big AIs.
Progress is fundamentally limited not by finances (which are a human abstraction) but by the energy budget and how much can be extracted from it. This has always been the case, really, although it's unusually blunt in case of AI since compute mostly needs cheap power.
There's a separate question of who controls how much energy, and can therefore decide where it's spent. This isn't an inherent limitation to progress, though - it's an imaginary limitation that exists in our minds, a collective delusion, if you will. There's no law of physics that says Sam Altman gets to decide; we as a society choose to respect the property rights that translate to his economic (and attendant political) power to do so. We could choose to stop respecting them, and if we do so collectively, there's nothing they can do about it.
But it’s not like someone is going to expend massive energy without any financial return
These problems are just for marketing for the time being
Maybe the worries of the field of math being “over” are a bit overblown since a lot of pure math these things may discover has no return to the company
- most capital-intensive manufacturing process ever invented
- lead time for expansion is several years
- demand that is highly uncertain on a timescale of months
- technology that goes rapidly obsolete
Unless one of these factors changes, it essentially guarantees that semiconductors will have the highest price volatility of any manufactured goods. As they have since the 1980s.
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