During periods of market exuberance, it’s in the vendors interest not to reveal where exactly x+1 is. At the moment, everyone just guesstimates the company’s TAM. Bringing certainty to that guesstimate cuts Anthropic off from the most exuberant market participants, bringing their post-IPO price down unnecessarily.

> Mythos at $X overwhelms their capacity, they could just charge $X+1

This may not be as valuable in the long term as getting committed customers hooked at a sustainable price.

The question is, will anyone pay enough for Mythos to offset the opportunity cost of offering that much Opus? You don't want to end up in a spot where you don't have enough compute and your service's reliability degrades to an unusable state like xAI.

Sort of, but valuation models depend on X being in a certain range. If it > this range, revenue and therefore valuation are impacted.

No insider info, but just wanted to mention that pricing signals things too. If Mythos is only servable at $X*Y dollars and isn’t Y times better than $X of compute at another provider, it’s quite possible that affects the IPO price negatively versus the halo of having the worlds most expensive model that is “too powerful to release” unpriced and unbenchmarked.

I think that most people at Anthropic are true believers from my interactions with them so I don’t believe this theory anecdotally. The simplest explanation is that it really is taking a while to gain confidence they won’t be used for a spree of bad cyber attacks. Knowing how long it takes institutions to fix security issues when filed by humans I would be more suprised if this wasn’t the case.

But I would forgive anyone who did think it was deliberately sandbagged; given the staggering sums at play, true believers might believe the ends justify the means to a little “marketing” like this.

And then the bubble would collapse. Corps are already putting limits on token usage across the board because of costs. Increasing costs would significantly contract the hype bubble.