00:11:39 · Amanda Silberling, Kirsten Korosec
[00:11:39] S2: Yeah. I think that it's not a coincidence that at the same time, we see this over optimization happening among people in tech, that there's also a movement of people that are reverting back to wanting to use flip phones, which I've talked about on Equity before. Or people who are buying CDs because they're tired of an algorithm telling them what they want to listen to. And it is just an interesting cultural tension that's happening where we haven't found the balance of what optimization actually helps us and what optimization just makes us feel like we aren't as human as we wanna be. [00:12:20] S1: Well, Amanda, you'll be happy to know that I have a massive, massive CD and even tape collection. Wow. So if you're ever looking to, you know, go really analog, just, you know, give me give me a ring, and I'll I'll happily share them with you. We do have to say goodbye to Amanda for now. Thanks so much for coming on. I hope you come on a lot more often. [00:12:42] S2: Thanks for having me. I hope to be back more often as well, and I hope that people know things about their kids is what I'll say.
00:12:42 · Amanda Silberling, Anthony Ha
[00:12:42] S2: Thanks for having me. I hope to be back more often as well, and I hope that people know things about their kids is what I'll say. [00:12:52] S0: So I think one of the reasons we're talking about this question of do tech CEOs, do AI CEOs know what people actually want, is because we're now at the point where some of these companies are actually going public. Public, and the Anthropic S1, which we've talked about in pretty much every episode of this show, is now officially available to the public. We've written about it a bunch at TechCrunch. Sean, I know, like, you know, on on a weekly basis, you will talk about your excitement about seeing the s one. So what jumped out to you?
00:13:21 · Sean O’Kane
[00:13:21] S3: Yeah. I mean, I think the big thing is that we have pretty much what looks like a... An actual business here. This is a company that we've talked about before. Has been kind of remarkably focused from day one. It hasn't gone on all these, you know, quote unquote side quests that OpenAI has gone on. You know, to some extent, it needs to do that because it's not a company like Google where it can generate a whole bunch of revenue from a search and ads business or or Waymo, you know, like it does not have the luxury of buffering against this incredibly expensive play. It doesn't own its own compute. So it's paying kinda through the nose for that. But it... That focus has paid off. We have a company that, you know, is is really growing its revenue like crazy. It was up to sort of more than $16,000,000,000 in the first half of this year, which is an enormous jump from last year where there were basically just about 1,000,000,000. And they have... I think the... One of the things that really stuck out to me was they have a ton of customers, like an enormous number of customers who are paying sort of more than a $100,000 a month. And, you know, they've just really laser focused in on enterprise work and all of this stuff, and it seems to really be paying off. I think there are still very big questions about the amount of money they have committed to companies like SpaceX to pay for compute down the road. They have, I think if you total it all up, it's kind of not a 100% clear in the document, but it's... I mean, we're we're talking about, like, approaching a trillion dollars that they've committed to pay out over the next, like, decade or couple decades. There's a lot of money. And and so there are questions about how they're gonna be able to to hit all that. But, you know, there were no, like, giant bombs hiding in here, and I think they properly addressed the existential risks that they face to. They seem to have addressed pretty much every risk. Their risk factor section is, like, nearly a 100 pages long. So, yeah, there's there's a lot here to dig into.
00:15:15 · Kirsten Korosec
[00:15:15] S1: Yeah. I was gonna say the the risk factors section, which I do wanna talk about in in a sec, to me was, you you know, maybe not a bomb. I guess I should have expected it, but it was unusually long. To your point earlier, we're still waiting on a a couple more details, but I do wanna note that they don't just have customers. Their revenue is insane. I mean, 16,300,000,000 in the first six months of the year, that's versus 1,200,000,000 the same period, same six month period the year before. Those losses, though, to your point of paying for compute and other things, obviously, are stacked up 80,000,000,000, I believe, in the first half of the year. So to me, they have a real business case. We wrote about this a little bit, which is that they're really trying to put their hooks into the enterprise customer, which seems to be a very important, you know, revenue driver for them. And now it's like, can they start closing that loss? Because shareholders aren't gonna accept that forever. Right now, they're fine with it. Right? We're talking about a company that's probably gonna be valued at a trillion dollars. They're okay with it. But, eventually, you gotta close that gap.
00:16:29 · Anthony Ha
[00:16:29] S0: Yeah. Although there's a very surprising kind of nuance to the loss discussion as well, which is that, I think, 80,000,000,000 is the net loss for the first half of the year, but the net... The operating loss is 693,000,000. So, I mean, you know, orders of magnitude different. And as I understand that... So they're... Like, most of that loss is really reflective of kind of all this debt and commitments that they're carrying. And so in theory, that if they need to sort of get to profitability quickly, they can. But, like, you know, that debt doesn't just disappear. Right? People are gonna get... Wanna get paid for whatever it is Anthropic has committed to paying for. Every company today is looking for an edge. Better insights, decisions, greater resilience. But as AI drives new growth, it also creates new demands on energy and infrastructure. Schneider Electric is connecting energy, automation, and digital technologies to help organizations make smarter decisions and operate more efficient. Because the future won't be shaped by AI alone. It will be shaped by energy and industrial intelligence. Schneider Electric, advancing energy tech.
00:17:38 · Sean O’Kane
[00:17:38] S3: Yeah. And, you know, I'll say, I think one of the big things that I took away from this is that while they're in position to do basically what you just said of, like, move into the world of profitability and and create a business that's sustainable, I don't think it's sustainable in the sense that we normally think about when we think about about a company that is trying to make a... An entire business out of something. It's like their big problem is they need to keep investing in all of these... It's really expensive things that make the technology possible, like renting out GPUs and renting renting out data center space. And they're... You know, if you read kind of... Not even necessarily between the lines, but you read this as one, the thing that stands out is they're basically saying, we need to keep growing in able to... Like, they cannot just, like, sort of, like, you know, coast at this point. They need to keep growing because they need more money to keep investing, to keep improving the product, to keep... You know, it's just... It's this perpetual motion machine until it isn't if something breaks bad. So there's a lot to consider, I think, for people who are looking at this as a public investment. Anthropic's pitch on that is sort of like, we're gonna be able to do all these incredible things with biotech, with research, with science. And so, you know, they kinda frame it in the s one, certainly in the letter from the cofounders up top, that like, you know, think of this almost less as like an investment in a company where you're gonna get dividends or something, and and more like being a part of this sort of potential revolution in how we live our lives, which, you know, that's up to everybody to decide how much they wanna buy into that if they're really gonna invest in this company as a public company.