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Comment by ankit219 | Hacker News Reader

Their projections for ARR at the end of this year at a high of $9B[1] at the end of this year. And reported gross margins of 60% (-30% with cloud providers partnerships). All things considered, if this pans out, it's a 20x multiple. High yes, but not that crazy. Specially considering their growth rate and that too at a decent margin at gm level.

[1]: It was $3B at the end of May (so likely $250M in May alone), and $5B at end of july (so $400M that month).

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Margins of 60%? On inference maybe but that disappears when you price in model training.

This guy's analysis says they are bleeding out despite massive revenue

https://www.wheresyoured.at/anthropic-is-bleeding-out/

In Jan, when deepseek launched, Dario Amodei had to disclose they spent about $10M to train the last generation of models (his arguments was deepseek was on the curve, not breaking it).

They earned $250M in May based on ARR, and about $400M in july. Model training is going to be amortized over multiple years anyway. I am not privy to how much they spent, not going to comment on that. GM was public news, and hence I got that.

Re Zitron's analysis, I don't find them to be reliable or compelling.

It doesn't make sense to amortize model training over multiple years since they train multiple models per year (e.g. Claude 3.5, 3.7, and 4 were released within 12 months). Or you can, but then you have to overlap amortization schedules multiple times over. E.g. if they amortized over 24 months, then they would still be amortizing Claude 2.1, 3, 3.5, 3.7, 4, and 4.1.

> Model training is going to be amortized over multiple years anyway.

Claude 4 launch was not even fifteen months after the launch of Claude 3 (which is discontinued). The “multiple” is 1.2 - I wouldn’t call that “multiple years”.

exactly. what are people who make these investments even betting on? it certainly is not revenue or dividends. so it can only be a bet the stock will go up faster than other less risky stocks.

and we continue to pretend that market generates any semblance of value.

> what are people who make these investments even betting on?

They they achieve AGI or a close approximation, and end up wealthier than god.

That's basically the bet here. Invest in OpenAI and Anthropic, and hope one of them reached near AGI.

hahahhahahahahahahahahhaha... oh wait, you're serious?

But if you're an investor who doesn't care about the long-term value of the firm, all you care about is maximizing your return on future sales of the shares of stock.

Doing proper intrinsic valuation with technology firms is nigh-on impossible to do.

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