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A comment on Anthropic IPO Valuation Talks Drop to $1.3T as Major Investors Balk. Parent comment

Re:Anthropic IPO Valuation Talks Drop to $1.3T as Major Inve... by steeleduncan on Friday November 06, 2026 @03:11PM (#50397747)
You need those staggering amounts of compute to run an inference service, but you don't need it to run a powerful model.

It doesn't cost a company that much to buy a box capable of running the Qwen3.8-Flash-Next model in the GP comment and never pay Anthropic again. The cost will be even more reasonable once the supply issue is solved for that hardware.

AI-as-a-service is a unique product because when the interface is natural language, there is no lock in. VS code has a hotkey to swap between claude, openai and a local model. Compare that to the difficulty of swapping from macOS to Windows.

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Re:Anthropic IPO Valuation Talks Drop to $1.3T as Major Inve... by chrsw on Friday November 06, 2026 @06:16PM (#50399819)
I’m not convinced that being able to serve open models makes the closed labs business model non-viable. I think there is overlap but I also think these are distinct value propositions. I wouldn’t dismiss the ability for one organization to point lots of resources at a particular problem, for example.

I don’t have any stake in this and I hate the idea of concentrated wealth and power, wherever it is: government or private businesses. But would I bet against it? Probably not.

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