Yet another Hacker News

Why Anthropic's Filing Crushed Tech Stocks

35 points chmaynard 1 hour ago 37 comments

conartist6 1 hour ago | parent

"The shift in politics is even starker. In the 2010s and early 2020s, big tech was well-liked by most people. But AI is absolutely loathed by the public. These companies have never faced real public dissatisfaction, they all imagine themselves to be the good guys, with the credibility of having created magical search engines and smartphones. But that era is gone. They are now akin to the bankers on Wall Street in 2008, and politicians are winning elections by saying they hate AI as much as the voters do."

Yeah I see this too. That we're not innovating any more also doesn't help make our industry look good

nixpulvis 1 hour ago | parent

You can't claim that the tech industry isn't innovating. You can say that innovation effort has shifted away from many things that still need it. The issue I have is that the companies and products are so large and complex that they are extremely difficult to compete with.

fwip 57 minutes ago | parent

It's not just that we're not innovating on good new products. We're innovating new ways to break the law and exploit human psychology.

Blockchain/NFT hype did a ton of damage to tech's credibility, as well as Uber before it (along with the many Uber for X apps).

riffraff 1 hour ago | parent

I'm in agreement with the general point but was big tech well liked in the early 2020s?

Facebook scandals had exploded already, Google had already long abandoned "don't be evil", nobody ever liked Microsoft, and I think sentiment towards Apple is somewhat unchanged.

gessha 39 minutes ago | parent

Tech at least in my eyes peaked around 2018-19. That also coincided with the first more mainstream public-aware introduction of vision and NLP systems into tech products. A few years later it all went downhill for the tech companies.

pigpop 1 minute ago | parent

Do you not remember when they were dragged in 2015-2016? or 4 years before that when they were heroes instead?

vrganj 1 hour ago | parent

This feeling made me leave the tech industry.

It felt like I was helping the bad guys, and my conscience couldn't deal with that.

lotsofpulp 57 minutes ago | parent

Considering the search engine company is selling a very popular self driving taxi service, they seem to be quite credible and innovative.

vlyan 46 minutes ago | parent

>But AI is absolutely loathed by the public.

by the public populating the echo chambers on reddit and bluesky, perhaps.

9.5 out of 10 normies use it daily now and have no negative opinions about it. the wholesome folx use it too, despite their incessant kvetching.

lithocarpus 32 minutes ago | parent

Most people I talk to use it because it's useful, but also hate what it means and what it is doing to the world.

There definitely has been a broad change in public perception of big tech and the future that it is taking us toward.

cjbgkagh 19 minutes ago | parent

I think there is a massive selection criteria bias, AI has been a batshit insane productivity boost for me but I’ve been so busy with it that I’ve generally stopped posting online - I only do so now because I’m out of quota. I no longer any point to in arguing with people - I’ve got better things to do, like argue with AI. I used to scour the Earth looking for smart people to talk to and now I don’t even have to leave my apartment.

vrganj 14 minutes ago | parent

I use all sorts of things I hate all the time.

This is not the gotcha you think it is.

cpburns2009 42 minutes ago | parent

People began disliking big tech well before this latest bout of AI.

lithocarpus 32 minutes ago | parent

This is true but the last few years have seen this dislike grow and spread a lot more than it was before - in my personal experience.

cjbgkagh 24 minutes ago | parent

In 2014 I moved from London to SF to start a big tech job. In my first day there I accidentally wondered into a massive rally, I asked one of the participants what it was about and they said they were protesting all these foreign tech workers coming to SF. It felt a bit weird to end up in the middle of an ‘anti-me’ rally - especially one so passionate and energetic. A few protesters pressed me on where I was from and what I do, I lied and told them I was an investment banker. They told me that they suppose that was ok. I specifically told them that because not long ago it was finance being the target of protests and I curious to see if they had somehow moved on - if this was a principled stance or if it was being astroturfed.

These protests ended up getting pretty violent, people were throwing rocks through bus windows, throwing up on cars.

cagenut 17 minutes ago | parent

hey little tip while you assimilate and learn the language - property damage is not violence

cjbgkagh 1 minute ago | parent

Don’t worry I didn’t stay long. I loved the Bay Area but did not like SF all that much.

I believe some of the busses were occupied when they were attacked and the lack of injuries was largely due to good fortune. I could believe a claim that this was done by false flag agitators intent on undermining the protests.

pigpop 4 minutes ago | parent

People are being led around by the nose. Cui bono? 2000 years and most people still can't manage to ask that question reflexively. AI hate is a parochial narrative being pushed by people who stand to lose influence. Examined objectively, there are reasons to be cautious when adopting AI tools but a knee-jerk rejection of everything AI is a purely irrational response that has been drilled into people through repetition, conformity and media influence.

Tech companies were never the "good guys" any more than they are the "bad guys" now. Those are just colored filters thrown in front of the lime light to shift your perception. As soon as tech or AI works to their benefit then suddenly they'll be the good guys again and no one will care they were the bad guys before. People just go where the algo leads them, believe what their influencers believe, think what their peers think.

bagacrap 1 hour ago | parent

Anthropic didn't lose $80B. Some complex securities tied to their stock went up in value by $72B, which they have to count as a loss, even though it's not cash out the door.

As far as Google's mark to market profit on Anthropic shares, everyone realizes that's not a sustainable source of income. Which is probably one reason why it's trading at about 15 times profits. If you back out the $99B of (unrealized) equity gains in anthropic and others, Google is trading at 25 times the last 12m earnings.

DennisP 59 minutes ago | parent

People should really look at cash flow statements instead of just earnings. Anthropic published one and their cash flow was positive for the first half of this year.

That doesn't mean all the circular financing won't be a problem, but people keep drawing the wrong conclusions from the negative earnings, which are relevant to investors but not so much to the viability of the business.

bagacrap 47 minutes ago | parent

What I don't understand about the circular financing is how does it not violate antitrust? All these supposed rivals own huge stakes in each other. Are they really competitors?

thewhitetulip 42 minutes ago | parent

Well rules stopped mattering to BigCo many hears ago

spwa4 21 minutes ago | parent

Strange how you complain about this for circular flows when of course the GOAT of circular flows is the money system itself

govt prints money (FED) -> government -> banks -> (economy) -> tax -> government

And the second "great circle"

govt loans money (FED) (money that doesn't exist, which isn't a problem if you can print money) -> banks -> (economy) -> loan repayment -> money gets "unprinted"/destroyed

Everything about the economy is a great circle. You will also understand after a while, if you wish for the economy to remain stable, this must be the case. You can't change it without either hyperinflation and extreme "capital flight" (between quotes because of course in that circumstances capital will run into gold or other physical resources), by either vastly overheating or stopping the economy.

And yes, most instances are of the overheating kind. The only case of stopping the economy was accidental (despite many warnings), in other words, yes, it was Republicans. But last time that happened, even republicans could decide to change course. Of course, only once huge damage was done.

trollbridge 39 minutes ago | parent

The entire economy relies on circular flows. That’s why we look at something called “net profit”.

beepbooptheory 18 minutes ago | parent

This made me chuckle, thanks.

mapt 20 minutes ago | parent

Zaibatsu - Clearly antitrust.

Keiretsu - perfectly acceptable business relationship preferences that in no way require governments to regulate their GDP growth / campaign donation black box machine.

cyanydeez 24 minutes ago | parent

people should look at dividends rather than anything else; but the people who matter at these scales are just dick measuring and don't care about anything to do with the actual economics of the system.

smallnix 5 minutes ago | parent

Re: positive Cashflow

Was that the one where they removed a bunch of big positions to make it positive (was it training cost, I forgot)?

dangoodmanUT 1 hour ago | parent

If they're referring to the recent tumble, I wouldn't suggest anthropic incited that

coreweave did

i'm sure ant didn't help, but thanks for the fire sale i guess

asmnzxklopqw 57 minutes ago | parent

did he even renormalize the dataset on the S-1 fill size?

NBJack 47 minutes ago | parent

The tech blowout had little to do with Anthropic's filing.

The numbers from multiple companies show a high CapEx investment in a product that has yet to be proven as profitable as the very things it is hurting (i.e. ads). End of story.

DanielHB 24 minutes ago | parent

Didnt it start with Korean stocks first? It feels like a wave, it hits there first then the US tech stocks. Korea index has stabilized for a few days now, but hasn't recovered what it lost.

simianwords 23 minutes ago | parent

The filing showed that it was profitable. The biggest expenses were because the stock valuation of Anthropic went really high.

I asked this to ChatGPT “if anthropics valuation didn’t rise and stayed at 200B what would their profit be on q2”

The answer is around 1B of profit.

phyzome 28 minutes ago | parent

Boy, people sure do love turning data points into stories.

cagenut 21 minutes ago | parent

in many ways, its the very thing that makes us people

simianwords 16 minutes ago | parent

I tried to give this article an honest read but

> Last year, for instance, Anthropic lost $80 billion, and Amazon had negative $42 billion free cash flow. The entire big tech complex, it seems, has moved from minting cash to burning it. And investors are, well, not panicking exactly, but wondering if the bubble is ending

Is this really the quality of such newsletters? I’m not asking rhetorically because I’d like to also have trustable sources to understand the underlying reality. I actually spent time understanding this part and the 80B dollar loss thing is completely misrepresented here (also went viral in other media).

feverzsj 14 minutes ago | parent

It's just the beginning. The real collapse will happen right after midterm.