HN user
It's actually shocking they didn't do this before? Load balancing across multiple similar paths seems to be one of the first thing you would add once you hit some scale?
I love how they congratulate themselves on that article (Google being Google, they still think they are the smartest people in the room). But I'm waiting to see the second or third unknown order effects.
That's actually exactly how I feel about Anthropic.
They play such a PR game, trying really really hard to be seen as the good guys. It feels as another satirical episode of Silicon Valley. It's very clear they are all money and power motivated while also pretending to do all of this for the good of humanity. I have rarely seen that level of hypocrisy and cultish behavior from leadership and employees there.
I would honestly just prefer if they were honest about being power and money hungry instead of playing that game of AI Safety.
This article is very long with almost no content. Except "spending more tokens is good". Obviously the author got something to sell us.
As a European, Democrats are absolutely not conservative from a European perspective. There are multiple dimensions but at least socially they push everything further to the left than in Europe. (Which is also in my opinion why they are losing elections)
Almost every social topic is pushed to the extreme left by the Democrats. Simply look at how many weeks abortion is allowed in blue state and compare with most European countries. Most European countries are way more conservative.
Economically yes, they are more conservative but even that is now changing as well (see: New York and AOC).
How many non-tech people knew about Anthropic before? How many know about Anthropic since this episode?
Still don't see it? Still don't see how the huge IPO coming up soon could profit from this?
Yes, this was a brilliant PR move (independent from the actual benefit of the model).
> Looking at the ongoing Mythos export control issue, it's obviously not good for profits
We must live in different planets. The whole episode about Mythos has been the absolute best free PR move ever designed. At this point everyone in tech assumes Anthropic and Mythos are the absolute best models. All of this got achieved without spending a single $$ in advertisement.
This model is also probably really dangerous, not denying that. But they definitely used it as a huge PR tool.
I think they should have basic workers rights still
You make it look like they are underpaid poor manual workers.
Those are people that chose to make >500k$/year by joining a company that is known to be one of the most toxic tech companies. Mos tof those people had probably multiple offers ad decided to optimize for money besides anything else. I have a hard time to feel sympathy or petition for their "worker's rights"
I came to the same conclusion.
Specifically Anthropic's whole PR has all been about danger, safety, doomerism all to make themselves indirectly more important and central to the debate.
Calling meetings in Washington DC in order to let everyone know they made a cyberweapon is part of those PR moves. Then they seem surprised lawmakers actually called them out and asked to stop serving that model.
I know this is the cynical take but I cannot unsee the elephant in the room: This doomerism allowed Anthropic to be the center of every AI conversation right now. Their market cap and upcoming IPO is indirectly benefiting from this.
I also cannot take that Anthropic while letting everyone know that Doom is coming (or is already here), are also the ones that want to decide who can profit from this Doomerism. This is how every benevolent dictators start.
Aaah the beautiful inability to see what is so obvious because your salary depends on it.
Google revealing how evil they really are.
That was always the plan with Chrome. Put B$ of engineering efforts into creating a nice browser and pushing people to switch over.
Once everyone is addicted and forgot about the competition, start to quietly make it more and more of a Spyware.
Chrome has always and will always be an attempt at controlling the client side of the funnel to be in charge of how much ads they can deliver to your brain. It's 100% a spyware with a side-effect of a browser.
Switch today. Firefox works well.
The issue is that it creates an incentive to maximize the cost of travel as the employee directly get miles based on the price.
I see this all the time with employees/managers booking a 1000$ flight that will give them 10k miles instead of a perfectly fine 400$ flight that would only give them 4k miles.
It has always been super difficult in tech to know who does what exactly. You can look at PRs or # LoC but we all know they are not very representative.
Plenty of people have realized that and played the visibility/politics game. Especially in the last decade where tech has tried to be more inclusive and less about hard metrics. Now the narrative is the key component of your performance review. It's vibes all the way essentially
Then you introduce a layer of line managers that are blurring the signal even more, to the point where the narrative about someone is way more powerful than facts. Their whole job is to play politics and pushing a narrative to other managers/ICs during 1:1s.
Source?
There is an actual ETF tracking IPOs: https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/IPO/
It's an index. The conventional way to market weight is to use market cap. The float rules are mostly for technical reasons around transaction costs for very large indices.
No the float rule is to avoid having to buy so much stock compared to the available stock that it would create irrational prices. This is probably going to happen with those IPOs. It's pure offer and demand!
To put it differently: Imagine a company is valued at 100B$ but only released 1% of its stock for sale (1B$). The NASDAQ100 includes it in its index based on the market cap only and because of that now needs to own about 100m$ of that stock. You are now trying to buy 100m$ out of only 1B$ available stocks. Prices are going to skyrocket artificially. If it was weighted on the float, it would only have been required to buy 1m$, which would make way more sense.
And an index can be whatever the company behind it wants it to be. The SP500 can decide absolutely whatever they want and every index fund will just have to agree and comply and buy based on those decisions.
But as everything if they do something stupid they lose credibility and customers. This is one of those instances in which they changed the rules in a way that made no clear sense and they will be remembered for that.
How would you differentiate insiders needing to sell versus insiders needing to dump before a crash?
To answer this, just ask yourself how many of the insiders would have bought the stock at current IPO's price? Most insiders would probably never touch those stocks at this price. I know a couple people at OpenAI and Anthropic that are very clearly selling everything they can as soon as they can.
This is all a carefully orchestrated PR game that is relying on retail to be the ultimate fool. I guess to some level every IPO is like that (A PR game to hype the company).
But never before had we 3 mega IPOs happening at almost the exact same time with so much money to unload on retails with dubious ways to force funds to gobble them.
Most IPOs end up negative after the first few quarters (at least compared to the SP500). When we are talking about a 20B$ company it matters less than 5T$ being suddenly fully unloaded on the public.
And Uber and Airbnb's IPO investors made of fantastically.
Did they? https://www.alphaspread.com/comparison/nasdaq/abnb/vs/indx/g...
The only way they might have is by getting the shares at the actual IPO price, and even then it's around the same as the SP500 return since then.
I agree with you that this might be a good marketing move overall.
And I don't really care about the chain of causation. The change of rules for the available float and the fact those funds will buy based on the market cap and not the float makes it a completely irresponsible investment at this point.
Both OpenAI and Anthropic were able to raise astronomical amount of cash on the private markets just weeks ago. I don't think that's what's driving them.
I really think what is driving this is the need for insiders, employees, early investors to be able to sell their stock at scale before the music stops.
And You can only do that through a full IPO. All those companies had private secondary transaction but none of them were big enough to transfer the Trillions of $ required for the insiders to unload their bags.
But for NASDAQ 100 I'm going to go ahead and say this was a brilliant market move, since nobody ever talked about that index before this.
Most people know the NASDAQ100 as its ticker QQQ. Also known as the high risk - high reward investment.
After reading how Nasdaq changed the rules in order to court all the mega IPOs to list with them, I will never ever consider a Nasdaq fund again. The rule change about the available float is especially shocking.
yes it will keep the grift going for a couple months due to the index artificial demand. Actually, SpaceX timed the unlocking of their shares to the timeline index funds will have to buy.
Guess who will hold the bag when it's all going downhill?
Just the fact that they still calling themselves OpenAI is so grotesque.
Similar to Google with "Don't be evil". At least they got the decency to eventually remove it when they realized they were actually doing evil.
Depending on how much that bubble will pop, all of those above might still be very right.
We could very well go back to the 2021 valuations.
Ben Felix got a great video on this subject: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iOyFja87uyw
The point he makes is that companies go public when they think they can get the maximum our of their shares on the retail market. Which make sense I guess.
But the fact that the 3 of them are hitting the public market at the same time means they all came to the conclusion that now is the perfect time to unload those shares. Probably because they know there is a high chance of a big crash coming after.
I will not touch those IPOs with a 10 feet long pole. But unfortunately a lot of people are about to get burned.
My prediction is that this is what will be remembered as the last bit of exuberance before everything starts to unravel.
Books will be written about how insiders will be profiting millions by unloading those shares to the greatest fools and middle class america.
I wish Adyen was as good at marketing and hype as Stripe was.
Stripe is really good at making themselves look like a way bigger deal than they are.
Those mega IPOs are the latest grift to unload overpriced shares before the whole AI tulip bubble explodes in everyone's face.
The insiders know it, which is precisely why those IPOs are happening right now. Employees and VCs don't want to be holding the bag. small-time investors will be.
Also, SpaceX is going to unlock more and more on their float at around the same time most indexes will have to buy it. It has been engineered to socialize the losses.
I'm happy SP didn't agree to fast track any of those, unlike VTI and Nasdaq100. I spent the weekend to rebalance all my retirement accounts to make sure none of them are going to fast track those grifty IPOs. Unfortunately, I cannot do that for my taxable accounts as it would generate a tax-event.
Seriously wondering who was even considering buying those. I know nobody cares about privacy anymore but this is another level.
Buying a camera and mic appliance from the least trustworthy company in the world, who has proven how far they can go to lie and get any single data out of you.
Can I seriously ask. how does anyone go about buying a piece of Spyware from the least trusted company in the world?
To me it's like buying health and fitness advices from a liquor or cigarette brand.
I had to get a head MRI this year as well through insurance. They billed 2500$ that all went towards my deductible.
In the past without insurance I was able to negotiate down a spine MRI from 2000$ to 500$ if I paid on the spot. Do with that what you want...
But essentially we are being forced to pay higher prices with insurance. Absolute scam.
What are the weighted chances of that happening though?
Do you also account for the chance that you might die everytime you take your car? Or that a meteor might hit you next time you take a walk?
At some point we need to be ok with some level of risks. That's just how the world is.
.... yes?
https://www.levels.fyi/?tab=levels&compare=Meta%2CSpectrum%2...
That is the starting package for a senior engineer at Meta. Most of them are in their mid-20s. Other FAANGs have similar pay.
Anyone that started more than 2 years ago also includes a crazy amount of stock growth as part of the package.
That doesn't apply to most people in the bay area (And especially at Meta).