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Comment by klik99 | Hacker News Reader

Those aren’t good comparisons.

Uber operated at a loss to destroy competition and raised prices after they did that.

Amazon (the retailer) did the same and leveraged their position to enter new more lucrative markets.

Dunno about Spotify, but Tesla and palantir both secured lucrative contracts and subsidies.

Anthropic is against companies with deeper pockets and can’t spend to destroy competition, their current business model can only survive if they reduce costs or raise prices. Something’s got to give

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They are good comparisons. All startups go against incumbents/competitors with deeper pockets.

Re: Anthropic specifically, I tend to agree, hence why I'm saying the deeper pockets (eg. Google, Amazon, etc) are perfectly positioned to win here. However, big companies have a way of consistently missing the future due to internal incentive issues. Google is deathly afraid of cannibalizing their existing businesses.

Plus, there's many investors with deep pockets who would love to get in on Anthropic's next round if their technical lead proves to be durable over time (like 6 months in AI terms).

This fight is still early innings.

Haven't they already cannibalized search? It really sucks now.

Google search results "sucking" probably is an indication that they are squeezing money out of it well. Just because you don't like the results you are getting doesn't mean the average user isn't still using Google a ton and generating $$$ for Goog

It’s true startups go against deeper pockets, but I stand by my analysis since Uber / Amazon / Tesla (to a degree) were early tech companies going against old companies and not competing with others doing the exact same thing. They operated at a loss to defeat the old guard. Today that model doesn’t work well, and Anthropic are against deeper pockets that are doing nearly the exact same thing as them. If they were the only innovative company with huge outside investment against entrenched and unwilling to innovate older companies like Uber and Amazon then I’d agree there was a bigger chance.

And I like Anthropic, I want them to be successful, but they just can’t operate at a loss like this for long, they have to make some tough calls, and trying to cut corners behind the scenes is not good for long term trust

Could this just be survivorship bias? How many companies burned money until they died? This isn't some hot take. I'm kinda interested. Surely more companies failed with this model than survived.

Anecdotally have worked for a company in the past that did just that and eventually went bankrupt. Know of many many more just in my city, for what it’s worth.

As long as Anthropic is better than their competitors they’ll continue to get my business.

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