Their bet is that they will acquire other companies to become valuable ( their ceo said they are competiton to every other industry)
It does not make sense but it is what they say
It does not make sense but it is what they say
The only way to get value from acquiring other companies is to buy them when they're distressed.
Take a look at how OpenAI has shaken up higher level math.
Frontier AI labs have a Swiss army knife of a tool that can do as well or better than every other company or collective in every industry.
Say you have a magic hotpot that can deliver any dish you want and each dish it delivers can be as good or better than any restaurant in your area of business. You basically cannot be beaten in the food business. Your competition can only cry about their cooking being more artisanal or whatever but at the end of the day convenience and cost will triumph.
Now say you have a magic pen for art, a magic jukebox, a magic text generator for authorship, and so on. You get the idea why I don't think Anthropic is wrong.
So I think they can compete in many industries (and I don't like it), but not all of them for sure. They can only compete in all industries with infinite money, and I don't think it would be good for most people.
The places where American society needs costs cut or needs an increase in labor - healthcare immediately comes to mind - are places where you'd be asking Anthropic (or any other AI player) to take on massive amounts of liability.
If you screw up someone's drawing, you regenerate the drawing and charge the hack/fraud for the privilege. If you screw up a blood bank order, you pay the survivors a few million dollars. Since you've created a system that can scale blood bank order up-screwing, you'll be doing that a lot. There's not profit in paying out medical torts.
Given that SV-based companies work to dismiss liability even more than most American companies do (which is saying a lot), I don't see that working well for them.