Does Anthropic's Success Prove Businesses are Ready to Adopt AI? (reuters.com) 19
AI company Anthropic (founded in 2021 by a team that left OpenAI) is now making about $3 billion a year in revenue, reports Reuters (citing "two sources familiar with the matter.") The sources said December's projections had been for just $1 billion a year, but it climbed to $2 billion by the end of March (and now to $3 billion) — a spectacular growth rate that one VC says "has never happened."
A key driver is code generation. The San Francisco-based startup, backed by Google parent Alphabet and Amazon, is famous for AI that excels at computer programming. Products in the so-called codegen space have experienced major growth and adoption in recent months, often drawing on Anthropic's models.
Anthropic sells AI models as a service to other companies, according to the article, and Reuters calls Anthropic's success "an early validation of generative AI use in the business world" — and a long-awaited indicator that it's growing. (Their rival OpenAI earns more than half its revenue from ChatGPT subscriptions and "is shaping up to be a consumer-oriented company," according to their article, with "a number of enterprises" limiting their rollout of ChatGPT to "experimentation.")
Then again, in February OpenAI's chief operating officer said they had 2 million paying enterprise users, roughly doubling from September, according to CNBC. The latest figures from Reuters...
Anthropic sells AI models as a service to other companies, according to the article, and Reuters calls Anthropic's success "an early validation of generative AI use in the business world" — and a long-awaited indicator that it's growing. (Their rival OpenAI earns more than half its revenue from ChatGPT subscriptions and "is shaping up to be a consumer-oriented company," according to their article, with "a number of enterprises" limiting their rollout of ChatGPT to "experimentation.")
Then again, in February OpenAI's chief operating officer said they had 2 million paying enterprise users, roughly doubling from September, according to CNBC. The latest figures from Reuters...
- Anthropic's valuation: $61.4 billion.
- OpenAI's valuation: $300 billion.
betteridge applies here (Score:5, Insightful)
No. On the other hand, high and middle management believes in buzzword-driven logic, and thus adopts it, ready or not.
Valuation isn't value (Score:5, Insightful)
Always remember this when you talk about a company's "success".
Re: (Score:2)
People are using their service, though. Many individual developers and smaller shops choosing to use Cursor, Claude Code, etc. which then use the Anthropic API to make it run are happily paying for those services. Then there are also new applications built on top of their API. Going from $1B to $3B in revenue is not something to dismiss lightly.
I'd say the real problem for this kind of usage is that swapping their API out as a backend is no work at all. Google's new models perform great and all that API rev
Re: (Score:2)
ummm 3 billion/year worth? more shadow puppet show
Revenue (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: Revenue (Score:2)
Yep, eventually these companies need to turn a profit. There will be a day when the free flow of funding will end - and it will probably be in the next few years.
Re: (Score:3)
Yep, eventually these companies need to turn a profit. There will be a day when the free flow of funding will end - and it will probably be in the next few years.
I'd guess sooner than that. All these AI companies have been crowing about how amazing their models are, and how ready they are to replace humans - the VCs currently funding them will be leaning on the companies to start paying off.
Re: Revenue (Score:2)
What bond yields 100% annually?
Re: (Score:2)
It doesn't have to. At the end of the fiscal year, cash in the bond for a cool 3 billion in revenue on the books.
Re: (Score:2)
whichever one you "project" to. heck why stop at 100%
The only proof here (Score:3)
The only proof here is that these companies are way overvalued.
No, of course (Score:2)
Ignoring the manipulative use of the word "success" in the headline, what this little bit of data means is that the continuous shitstream of propaganda is having the intended effect. Does McDonalds' success prove that people believe they offer fine dining?
Re: No, of course (Score:3)
By what measures?
I'm not convinced you can draw that conclusion at this point.
What do you mean by ready? (Score:2)
Do you mean, are preparing to do so immediately, or are already doing so? Yes.
Do you mean, are they ready to capitalize on its strengths and benefit from doing so? Heh heh heh
Re: (Score:2)
Precisely.
Many employees are already using AI in generally unauthorized ways, to eliminate some of their own drudge work. AI is already good at stuff like creating job descriptions and slide decks, the stuff employees hate doing.
But for uses that go beyond "fluff" AI is more buzzy than ready for prime time. Everything it spits out, requires significant hand-editing, whether it's code or slide decks.
"key driver is code generation" (Score:2)
I see people scoffing here but "400 million weekly active users, up 33% in less than three months", that's pretty amazing. I use it for code generation and it is outstanding. I haven't tried Claude 4 yet, supposedly a big improvement.
Prone to giving false information or not? (Score:2)
There is a huge difference between AI that gives false information and AI that only provides factual information. If what AI comes up with is full of "that doesn't really exist!" situations when you go through to verify the output from AI, then people clearly should not be substituting AI for real workers. For lawyers, how many of them are using AI to generate legal briefs that cite cases that don't exist? If AI is giving you stuff that works, that's useful, but with the number of reports about AI jus
How about code maintenance? (Score:2)
Everybody hypes the code generation ability of AI, forgetting the ages-old wisdom that code is read a lot more than it is written. Look at any large software project and you'll see that there are a few lucky bastards who got to write the code and an army of maintainers lucky if they get to write "10 lines per day".
The 10 lines per day is generous as the "1000 lines per year" is more accurate and there are about 250 working days in the year.
Right now my team has to diagnose a crash that happens on cloud mach