Anthropic faces intense competitive pressure and huge fixed costs. Can Claude build itself fast enough to succeed?
The Anthropic S-1 seems to have provided the financial justification for the company to spend as much as it possibly can on compute. If you are the kind of person who wonders if Anthropic is doing its level best to build a machine god while convincing Wall Street it's in the business of selling IT contracts, Anthropic has just offered a handy solution: Doing a bunch of things that look like you're trying to build the machine god is the only way to avoid going bankrupt
Forget about the machine god for a minute. At least in my read of the S-1, it seems like Anthropic is pinning the future of its company to dramatic growth; it has to, in order to meet its fixed costs. You don't have to be an AI skeptic to lift an eyebrow at these numbers. But if you are skeptical that dramatic recursive self-improvement is possible — in the way the business plan seems to require — this doesn't look like a good investment
