Latent Space: The AI Engineer Podcast
00:00:00 · Jamin Ball, Shawn Wang
[00:00:00] S0: Because the reality is, as open ad and Anthropic, they have far more powerful models that they've developed that they just haven't released yet. If you compare the dollar spend in compute a year ago versus today, their compute that went towards serving models has gone up by 2.3x. Their revenue over the same period of time has gone up 14x. So embedded in that is basically a 7x efficiency gain in serving inference, which, I mean, this is a business that I think is almost accidentally profitable. Right? Maybe my favorite stat of the whole S1 was 141,000,000,000 of capital raised to date. That's inclusive of equity, converts, and safes, and a $134,000,000,000 cash balance today. Like, right now, you wanna go raise multibillion dollar debt for GPUs? No bid. No bid. They're... Like, debt markets are close. There are, you know, big debt deals that aren't happening. [00:01:06] S1: Okay. We're here in the studio with Jamin Ball from Altimeter. Welcome. [00:01:09] S0: Thanks for having me. Excited to be here. [00:01:11] S1: Anthropic is IPO ing. I was thinking of who do I know would be the perfect guest to cover the s one. You're the guy. [00:01:17] S0: The Alph. I appreciate it. [00:01:18] S1: You're the guy. We met before I think you started your Substack. I maybe was just starting mine. How old is it? [00:01:25] S0: Six and a half years now. [00:01:27] S1: Okay. Actually, no. You're older. So clouded judgment is, like, one of the top. Like, what what are the brag statistics about clouded judgments?
00:01:27 · Shawn Wang, Jamin Ball
[00:01:27] S1: Okay. Actually, no. You're older. So clouded judgment is, like, one of the top. Like, what what are the brag statistics about clouded judgments? [00:01:34] S0: Oh, brag statistics. Like Probably getting close to a 100,000 subscribers, you know, every week. I I think in six and a half years, I've I've missed one Friday. Yeah. Try to be pretty consistent. [00:01:46] S1: And the the the general... Like, my takeaway is, like, here's, like, public markets comms for the start up investing that you do, but Altimeter is... Like, does everything. Right? [00:01:54] S0: Yeah. The the idea was, hey. How can I provide some commentary on metrics around software companies and, you know, the the universe of companies that that typically has public metrics or public companies as a as a way to kinda? Not guide, but provide a blueprint to early stage companies and founders of like, hey. Here are some of the metrics required to be public one day. Yeah. And so there's lots of tables and charts and graphs on public metrics and valuation multiples. And maybe three, four years ago, I I kinda started writing a little ramble upfront, which is more of a... I kinda treat it as a personal journal. Like, what's on my mind? What what have I been thinking about? What's what what... What's top of mind? And, you know, that'll range from anything from, you know, some macro commentary to market commentary to, you know, trends in AI or what... You know, what... Whatever's trending at the moment.
00:01:54 · Jamin Ball, Shawn Wang
[00:01:54] S0: Yeah. The the idea was, hey. How can I provide some commentary on metrics around software companies and, you know, the the universe of companies that that typically has public metrics or public companies as a as a way to kinda? Not guide, but provide a blueprint to early stage companies and founders of like, hey. Here are some of the metrics required to be public one day. Yeah. And so there's lots of tables and charts and graphs on public metrics and valuation multiples. And maybe three, four years ago, I I kinda started writing a little ramble upfront, which is more of a... I kinda treat it as a personal journal. Like, what's on my mind? What what have I been thinking about? What's what what... What's top of mind? And, you know, that'll range from anything from, you know, some macro commentary to market commentary to, you know, trends in AI or what... You know, what... Whatever's trending at the moment. [00:02:43] S1: Yeah. I think every generation, there's kind of a VC blogger who's, like, sort of the guy to cover what's going on. It used to be Fred Wilson, you know, if you're back in the day. He used to write AVC, I think. Yeah. And then more recent... Like, Tomas Tunguz. Yeah. I mean, he's still active, but, like, I feel like you are the king of, like, charts and public stocks right now. [00:03:03] S0: No. I appreciate it. I mean, Tomas was a huge inspiration. So [00:03:05] S1: I Right. [00:03:05] S0: I was at Redpoint for for quite some time with Tomas, and, you know, I buy
00:03:05 · Jamin Ball, Shawn Wang
[00:03:05] S0: I was at Redpoint for for quite some time with Tomas, and, you know, I buy [00:03:09] S1: all this. And now now you started theory. Exactly. And then... Yes. Exactly. But is Redpoint okay? You guys are all leaving? [00:03:14] S0: Said No. Redpoint's great. They're they're they're great. I mean, I owe everything I learned to to those guys, and I I have a ton of respect for them. [00:03:20] S1: Yeah. Yeah. Amazing. Okay. So we're gonna get right into Anthropic, and you have a a sort of some spiel. You've had some public dust ups with people that we won't name. People are just generally very confused because they... A lot of them have never... A lot of our audience are engineers and researchers. Yeah. They've never seen an s one. Yeah. They... They've never been through an IPO process. They don't know what a roadshow is. They don't know how this is done. Mhmm. But more importantly than that, just the... That's the mechanics. Yeah. More importantly than that, what does it mean about our general state of AI? Right? Yeah. This is the most visibility we've ever gotten into Anthropic. [00:03:53] S0: Yes. Yes. [00:03:54] S1: And, like, well, now we know a lot more things than we used to.
00:03:54 · Shawn Wang, Jamin Ball
[00:03:54] S1: And, like, well, now we know a lot more things than we used to. [00:03:57] S0: Yeah. Totally. Totally. And just just to say up... Say it upfront, because I've been asked to say this. So these are... I work for Altimeter. We have a big position in Anthropic. Everything I say is... You know, these are all my personal views versus versus versus my firm views. But, yeah, it's a big deal. I think, you know, the big labs, OpenAI, and Anthropic seems like every quarter their numbers leak, but it's a subset of the numbers. It's not it's not everything. And now we kinda get a full open kimono view of the financial profile of, you know, one of the most important and iconic companies maybe of our lifetime. And just kind of a a quick process process refresher. They'll file an s one, probably wait about fifteen days. There's usually a minimum until they'll start a roadshow. The roadshow is when they actually start and they pitch investors, IPO investors that, you know, travel across the country, across the world to pitch the IPO. That'll usually last a week and a half, and then it will start trading publicly. So we're probably looking at [00:04:50] S1: End November.
00:04:50 · Shawn Wang, Jamin Ball
[00:04:50] S1: End November. [00:04:51] S0: Yeah. Like mid end of November, you know, kind of fifteenth to twentieth, tenth to twentieth of November of of when it actually starts trading publicly. Yeah. Do people IPO past Thanksgiving? That's like a weird dead zone to You know, between Thanksgiving and Christmas is is kind of a dead zone. Yeah. I would say, you know, post Labor Day to Thanksgiving is generally a kind of like a hotbed time for companies to go public. People are around. People are engaged. And it's Anthropic. The reality is is I I think people would people would make time for it. [00:05:25] S1: Work for it though. [00:05:25] S0: Right? Yeah. Exactly. Exactly.