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smt88 • today at 12:52 AM • 1 reply • view on HN

We talk about revenue far later in a company’s lifecycle than we did before because high-tech, high-capex companies take a long time to become profitable.

Amazon is now the posterchild for this, but it happens in other industries like pharma a lot too. And in today’s stock market, where a fundamentally weak company like Tesla can trade at eye-watering multiples because of speculation, why worry about profitability at all? (Partly joking but that’s how people think.)

When and why we start expecting Anthropic to be profitable are great questions though.


Replies

Mistletoe • today at 1:03 AM

Amazon has the world on lockdown though as the best place to buy stuff and get almost anything to my house in a day or so. I can use any AI model out there at ever decreasing razor thin margins and there is no moat or lock in at all. Nor do most people even need AI. I’ve certainly never and would never pay for AI anything. Anthropic is basically in the paper business, AI is a commodity at best, but maybe worse, because people actually need paper.

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