alt Hacker News> If the party continues, they'll go from $50b in revenue to $500b and be fine.
You really have to be insane to think that an AI company will ever reach $500B in revenue. That's almost the same as (2025) Amazon, Walmart, etc., companies with a MUCH wider market.
It is MORE than Apple, it's 5 times more than NVidia even. There is absolutely no software seller that is even remotely close to $500B in revenue.
Absolutely ridiculous.
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The thing to be remember about those companies you listed, none of them are software companies like Anthropic is.
* Amazon is a logistics company * Walmart is a logistics and retail company * Apple is a hardware company (that uses software to set their hardware apart) * NVidia is a hardware company
The closest you get is Microsoft, at 281B in revenue. Some might argue Google/Alphabet, which is in the same area, but they sell Ads, not software.
Anthropic's expectations is that they will be able to fast-track their revenue generation to almost twice what Microsoft does today. In less than a few years.
I think you are underestimating the market for AI. The better it gets the more the market expands.
The total amount spent on salaries in he US alone is over 12T dollars.
Assuming AI becomes ever more useful and is widely adopted 500B in revenue is not that crazy.
I agree with you from our perspective it is ridiculous. I also agree that getting the consumer market to willingly pay for AI to the point where it sustains such an amount of revenue is not going to happen. (The knock on effects of folks using AI, and turning others off to AI because they used AI instead of writing emails themselves, for example).
But.
They may peak at 500B before this bubble bursts, simply because other major industry players are betting on AI as a means to get folks to believe in their own stock.
It’s belief all the way down, until you get to the point where “the market” starts asking where the return on investment is, and why they haven’t seen it yet. By that time, the investors have gotten their return and cashed out, and it’s the pension funds and the retail traders that are holding the bag.
And of course, at some point AI’s promise will be delivered in a form or fashion as yet unknown to us, but that is still years away, and until folks recognize that LLMs as they exist to day are not the path to that, they’ll continue to believe in this valuation.
Nvidia almost hit 100B in revenue last quarter.
That doesn’t seem ridiculous at all. Replacing clerical and knowledge workers is a vastly larger market than iPhones.
What feels ridiculous today might be the normal of tomorrow. Welcome to the new world.
What you are saying is the same thing that has been said about anyone trying to do anything massive and at scale. Can't be done - thats ridiculous - you are out of your mind.
I’ve spent more money on Claude this year than I’ve given to a lot of other tech companies, combined. Well, I bought a new phone too - but amortised over the phone’s lifetime it’s still much cheaper than I’ve spent on my claude subscription and what I’ve gotten my company to pay in api usage credits.
There are two questions. Will the value keep scaling? And how much of that value chain will anthropic hold on to? Right now software development is being eaten alive by LLMs. Will that happen to other industries too? And in the long run, what do the models we run look like? Are people going to end up self hosing opensource models themselves, or are we going to collectively hitch our wagons to frontier models provided by anthropic and their competitors?
If ai keeps getting better - which I think it will - and if anthropic can corner a large part of the market in an enduring way - which seems less likely to me - then yes. I can easily imagine them becoming a huge company.