alt Hacker News> But I want them to be valued far more realistically.
They are. That's the problem. The obligations that these companies are, on paper, supposed to meet require these valuations.
If you value Anthropic at $500b that's still a fuckload and vastly less than their obligations and a lot of people are going to say "well wait a minute how am I going to get paid".
The amount of spend going on, and planned, is insane and underpins a lot of this, and is why people are skeptical of the valuations. It has nothing to do with "Wanting" AI to fail and just a reasonable bet based on the math. For them to pay back what they have on their balance sheet entire continents will functionally be a spec in comparison, and that's really really fucking unlikely to happen.
Doubly so when you consider that there's a question of if they can be profitable to projected needed levels without fundamentally breaking some economics parts, and that this looks a lot like the overbuild of the internet during the dotcom bubble, which was also hideously overvalued at the time, for the time frame they were looking at, despite being THE literal world changing tech.
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> They are. That's the problem. The obligations that these companies are, on paper, supposed to meet require these valuations.
How does that make sense lol
"it owes a bunch of people money, so it should be worth more"
i don't...
> For them to pay back what they have on their balance sheet entire continents will functionally be a spec in comparison
Walk me through this math. I’m seeing $900bn Capex over a decade. That’s $90bn required free cash flow a year, on average. If they can do 25% margins, that requires $360bn annual steady-state revenues. That doesn’t require continent-scale anything.
> If you value Anthropic at $500b that's still a fuckload and vastly less than their obligations and a lot of people are going to say "well wait a minute how am I going to get paid"
Not how valuations work!
Walmart made $187bn in sales last quarter of which $6.5bn became net income [1]. That supports $115bn in liabilities and a trillion-dollar market cap at 46x earnings [2].
If you want a more-extreme example, look at JPMorgan: Its $900bn valuation (14x earnings) [3] supports $4.6 trillion of liabilities and $5 trillion in assets [4].
Comparing valuation to liabilities to judge solvency is bunk on multiple levels.
[1] https://www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Archives/edgar/data/0000104169/0...
[2] https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/WMT/
[3] https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/JPM/
[4] https://www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Archives/edgar/data/0000019617/0...