Brad DeLong, Dan Wang, and Noah Smith over at Hexpodia:
Brad is or is cosplaying a bear. But he reflects that he was a bear on the long-run supergrowth prospects of Google, Facebook, and Amazon too. And he was wrong.
Dan Wang moderates a bull-vs-bear debate on the coming Anthropic IPO. Brad argues that Anthropic has exactly one proven paying business, coding agents. Everything else it does is either going to be give away free by the platform monopolists or depends for its long-term profitability on a “secret sauce” nobody has yet discovered.
Noah argues the real prize is a change in industrial organization. If frontier AI makes business decision-making learnable, every firm will need to tie its capital structure to a frontier lab.
Will the surplus from modern advanced machine-learning models (MAMLMs) flow to Anthropic’s shareholders, or will it be competed away to users and to hyperscalers determined to keep Anthropic from sitting between them and their customers (the “Netscape problem”)? We will see.
The podcast can be found here.
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