00:19:13 · Kirsten Korosec
[00:19:13] S1: Well, speaking of buying, one of the ways that the company is growing is through acquisitions. And I spent a little bit of time going through the s one. We've reported on some of these. Coefficient Bio was one. We don't exactly know, I think, with the acquisition prices. There's some questions on valuation on that one. But if you look through the s one, they've made... I calculated about, excluding Coefficient Bio, something like $737,000,000 worth of acquisitions. About 260 of... Million of those, they don't disclose, but then there's been some reporting over the past six months or so of revealing some of these some of these companies. And there's some really remarkable ones in there. There is a, not disclosed in the s one, but a one person biotech company that Anthropic bought. So to me, that's very interesting. There's the classic growth story, but they are still doing acquisitions, and they seem to be focusing on very specific slices of how AI tools could be used. So biotech is one of those. And I think we're gonna see more of that activity certainly over the next year or so. So I can't wait to see what they're what they're gonna buy next. I'm sure there's a lot of founders out there who are hoping it's them.
00:20:35 · Anthony Ha, Kirsten Korosec
[00:20:35] S0: Yeah. I mean, it it speaks to, I think, probably one of the the balance that they're they're probably continually trying to have to strike that we've already alluded to, which is essentially, you know, that the part of the reason that they are doing relatively well right now is is that they've been, again, relatively speaking, focused you know, some core use cases, enterprise customers, building a real business as opposed to just, like, trying to apply LLMs to everything possible. But at the same time, they need to grow. Right? And and so that they're going... I imagine that there's probably a lot of push and pull of, like, we need to, like, move into new areas like biotech, but we have to also be somewhat strategic about it. But, you know, one of the things we also touched on earlier was risk factors. So I'm curious if anyone has a favorite or favorites of the risk factors that are worth highlighting here. [00:21:25] S1: I have a couple, but I will reserve time for Sean as well because I know he has some as well. One, that models could be so resistant to being shut down that they may use [00:21:36] S0: blackmail. That's happened in testing.
00:21:36 · Anthony Ha, Kirsten Korosec
[00:21:36] S0: blackmail. That's happened in testing. [00:21:38] S1: Yeah. Also, that, its AI tech could create liabilities. That's not very exciting. But the caveat is is that it would be too large, not just for its own insurance coverage, but for the entire insurance industry to cover, which seems like a problem if that were to happen. And then finally, very quickly, there is an interesting one that I'm not gonna get too deep into because we don't have enough time, but basically how the corporate structure is set up in a way and how it matches up with how the cofounders have sort of dedicated 80% of their personal equity to, philanthropic causes. And the end result of this is that these founders may end up with more, like, great voting control and maintaining that, but less economic power. So that is kind of an interesting risk factor that... I don't know. I don't think we're gonna see it play out for a long time, but but that is one I'll be definitely paying attention to.
00:22:44 · Sean O’Kane
[00:22:44] S3: Yeah. I mean, there's a lot of fun ones like, you know, including some that have been reported in the run up to the release of this, like, you know, the existential risk to humanity and all that fun stuff. I think the I think the insurance one is is one of my favorites because it's just, like, one of the most over the top things to have to point out. Like, I gotta imagine the lawyers sitting in a room and being like, well, I guess we technically do need to disclose that this could run way past what the entire insurance industry is is willing to do. Instead of focusing necessarily on, like, one more specific risk factor, because I think those are pretty good examples. But one other thing I wanna point out about it is, you know you know I'm a fan of language and and words and word choice, and I thought it was really interesting. There there are two things in this document that I found really interesting. One, in the risk factor where it describes how being designated a supply chain risk by the DOD, you know, can be material to the business. Anthropic's lawyers decide to call it the Department of War, which is the sort of chosen name of the Pentagon at the moment. And that's an interesting place to go along with that idea. In contrast to that, in the definition section of the s one, they do define SI, but it is not super intelligence. It is systems integrators. Yes. So they are they are using AI throughout this document in sort of contrast to the Trump administration and reserving the term SI that the administration prefers so much these days for systems integrators. So I just thought those were two interesting choices because it's like where they think they want to be able to carry, like, a little tiny bit of favor, they'll go with what the Department of War is calling itself. And and where they don't want to, they'll stay on their ground for now.
00:24:30 · Anthony Ha
[00:24:30] S0: Yeah. I mean, obviously, making any predictions is always just an exercise in, like, making yourself look like an idiot six months from now. But I will say that I would be very, very surprised if any of the major executives are still using superintelligence as their primary term of art six months from now. I feel like we're gonna look back and go, isn't that weird that they tried to make that happen? But we'll see if I get that right. I think one other thing I wanna highlight that's not so much a singular risk factor but felt like an interesting juxtaposition and a big question for companies like Anthropic was over the weekend, Apollo, the the private equity firm, you know, their chief economist, put out a little note that basically said there's been no economic value provided by AI so far, specifically at at large corporations. Like, you take the S and P 500, you subtract, you know, the seven big tech firms, that essentially there's no sign that revenue is improving, revenue per employee is improving, and yet these companies have made major investments in AI. So there's a question of what is all of this spending actually buying? And I think you can make a very good argument that it's simply too early to see that, but I think it speaks to the fact that we're at the point where companies are gonna need to start seeing that return. And if they don't start seeing that return, I think those kind of... Like, those... The serious contracts that you're seeing reported in the s one, those could start going down. They could start going in the wrong direction if companies are not actually seeing a real payoff. But I think that's probably all the time we have to talk about Anthropic because we have two other deals we wanna get to. The first one being a startup that does self driving excavation. Is that right, Kirsten?
00:26:09 · Kirsten Korosec
[00:26:09] S1: Yeah. Yeah. So this is a company called Bedrock Robotics. They've got this really interesting pedigree of folks who come from Waymo and sort of the robotics field, and they created this... Basically, this self driving kit that can be put onto construction equipment, the excavator being, like, the really important one because it's such a highly skilled job. And they had a couple breakthroughs besides just raising 600,000,000 in new funding. They also, this same week, basically now have, like, commercial... Real commercial operations happening. And that is an important point because this company is two years old. So that's, like, really satisfying. Right? Because oftentimes, we see years of pilots and promises and MOUs and things like that. And and here we have, like, the beginning of a real business.