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Comment by mattmaroon | Hacker News Reader

$2 trillion is a lot of money and certainly doesn’t seem a safe bet at that price. But also, their revenue went from <$0 in 2024 to $4b in 2025 to what will likely be >15x that in 2026. Has anything ever grown that fast before?

If you carry that forward even one year, and I’m not saying you certainly can, they’re outselling NVIDIA.

I get it, there are risks, scalability issues, low cost competitors, etc. $2 trillion is a big number, but it’s tiny compared to all human payroll.

I’m not buying it either but I dont think anyone who does failed an IQ test.

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> Has anything ever grown that fast before?

Is it true growth, or circular dealing plus hype? I have little doubt the IPO is nothing but a wealth transfer from retail investors who'll be left holding an empty bag.

I take no position on the correct valuation of Anthropic, but I think if you've used coding agents, it's pretty clear that it's not just hype; they really are a useful technology that can massively increase software engineering productivity.

As far as I know the circular deal fears are more around the chip purchasing agreements, because there is a speculative component to building out datacenters for training which may not produce models that are worth the training cost, but the revenue from inference is real and it has truly grown a lot over the past two years.

    > ...it's pretty clear that it's not just hype; they really are a useful technology that can massively increase software engineering productivity

Problem: Anthropic isn't the only provider. You can argue whether they are the "best" provider, but both GLM and DeepSeek exist and are really, really good. I was using Qwen offline on a trans-Atlantic flight on a 128GB MBP and output was totally acceptable.

Yea I am certainly not saying that Anthropic in particular is worth the valuation they are seeking or that they will end up a winner in the AI race; only that AI is not just hype, and that their inference revenue growth is real.

That's a beefy MBP! I imagine it was quite hot by the end of that flight if you were running Qwen the whole time

It was a hot-plate; could probably make some flapjacks on it...

Problem: Anthropic is the only provider.

Is a hypothetical, but is one that's an even higher risk factor for investors.

With the NASDAQ rule change, even more so.

https://ir.nasdaq.com/news-releases/news-release-details/nas...

That’s a good question that I assume will be cleared up in the prospectus, but I have to assume that enough of it is just cash coming in that they and OpenAI are likely the fastest growing companies of all time, or at least very high up the list.

> Has anything ever grown that fast before?

Cancer. Burkitt Lymphoma takes a couple of days to double in size.

It’s important to understand that infinite growth inside a finite system is impossible. At some point growth has to stop, either by eliminating the growing organism or it killing the host.

Well, unlike the economy I can’t grow in size rapidly. (And if I did I’d just have another major problem.)

Induced demand and limitless cheap human-quality labor can possibly grow the pie very fast, though even then, you start running into the earth’s finite resources eventually. But it is possible that they are worth much more than $2 trillion long before that.

But that is why I said you can’t just safely assume 15x multiples to continue.

> it’s tiny compared to all human payroll

The benefits of replacing all human payroll will go to AI companies as a whole. AI companies as a whole != Anthropic.

As the article points out, the greatest threat to closed models like Anthropic's comes from cheap open source models. Not from the possibility that AI won't be successful at replacing payroll.

That’s a risk for sure.

If you don't need ROI then with this kind of money I can make revenue grow even faster.

I’m buying, this is the greatest invention of all time and Anthropic has garnered a pretty solid lead right now.

> this is the greatest invention of all time

I think it's a little early to make that statement. Could be. But at this point I think things like printing press, agriculture, writing ... they're all many times more significant.

I know it’s a hot take, but I disagree. I think the invention of AI (or more specifically, ASI with RSI) will dwarf the printing press, agriculture, writing, etc. in terms of significance.

Now, obviously all these things built on each other, so comparing them like this is a little silly, but in my view, inventing AI is essentially inventing an inventor of fantastical things on par (and beyond) the greatest inventions of humanity, including the ability to self-improve.

To be clear, I don’t think today’s LLMs are there yet, and I take no position on whether they’re a dead end, but in my view ASI has no fundamental barriers that cannot be overcome in time.

"The invention of a magical wish-granting technogenie that has not yet been invented, and may never be invented, and we have no idea how we could get from what we have to inventing it, would be the best thing of all time!"

> I’m buying, this is the greatest invention of all time and Anthropic has garnered a pretty solid lead right now.

Depends on your perspective, but that's definitely true if you're selfish and have been paying people for intellectual labor. Lots of layoffs to fantasize about (even though that represents vast amounts of pain and destruction for many people).

I agree with you about the greatest invention of all time part, the rest is where my crystal ball gets hazy.

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