Gary Marcus: ‘Just Say No to Anthropic’s IPO’

Gary Marcus: When a business needs exponentially increasing amounts of capital to make modest increases in quality in an intensely competitive market and still owes far more money than it has ever made, there is a serious problem. I continue to believe that there is no moat in AI models. None. But the entire premise of Anthropic’s IPO is that they have an enormous gulf of a moat. I would not be shocked to see Anthropic go out of business. Nor would I be shocked if the IPO fails. WeWork tried to IPO, 3 times, and didn’t make it. I would be surprised if Anthropic does not go out of business. Most cults implode, and Anthropic doesn’t even hide that they’re a cult. And I just don’t see how the math works. Scientology is a long-running cult, but Scientology hasn’t committed $900 billion in spending over the next few years. (Marcus’s post is on his Substack blog, which, annoyingly, requires you to be logged into a Substack account and to “subscribe”, even though it’s ostensibly a free post. What a rotten oppressive turd of a blogging platform Substack is. Just in case your Substack account isn’t working, here’s a PDF archive.)  ★