Latent Space: The AI Engineer Podcast
00:44:14 · Shawn Wang, Jamin Ball
[00:44:14] S1: But... Okay. But then, like, there's a right price for that. [00:44:17] S0: Of course, of course. And this is not like, will it be priced right or this or that? That's more of, hey, if you're able to take a longer term view on will the business be successful over time, I think to me that's the most important question. Now, you think the IPO price is cheap, expensive, just right, I mean, we don't even know what that's going to be yet. Prices can change at public companies for idiosyncratic reasons, reasons based on individual company performance, or they could change for macro correlated risk. Like the reality is, if Anthropic went public a month ago, the big route that you've seen in public markets recently, especially in semis and the AI trade, Anthropic would also be down, even if the business was doing well. So stocks can go up and down based on individual company performance as well as just market beta. Exact... Exactly. [00:45:02] S1: Exactly. So, you you should be prepared for those kind of discussions if you're getting into this. I think... Actually, just as a side question, there's a lot of these, like, nonpublic market trackers of the stock, like like, here's my proxy of OpenAI stock. Here's my proxy of Anthropic stock. Do you guys put any weight into that or, like, zero? You think? [00:45:21] S0: I don't. Yeah. Yeah. I don't. [00:45:22] S1: Yeah. I'm just... I... I'm wondering if I should pay attention to those things more closely because they they do give some indication of, like, well, here's the stock price reaction when the model just reacts.
00:45:22 · Shawn Wang, Jamin Ball
[00:45:22] S1: Yeah. I'm just... I... I'm wondering if I should pay attention to those things more closely because they they do give some indication of, like, well, here's the stock price reaction when the model just reacts. [00:45:32] S0: I mean, it might it might show some market sentiment. [00:45:34] S1: Yeah. [00:45:34] S0: Right? But I think RAMP had some data. I think I copied a RAMP chart the other day. I mean, this was Anthropic spend Yeah. On some of their most recent models. The dark blue is Opus five five. And like, hey. What what the ramp data shows is People switch. Yeah. Exactly. And and with with Opus five five, you saw some reacceleration. And so would it surprise me if you saw a reacceleration of revenue and run rate in October, and October won't be in q three, that's the first month of q four? No. It wouldn't surprise me because I do think a lot of the third party data is showing and suggesting that.
00:45:34 · Jamin Ball, Shawn Wang
[00:45:34] S0: Right? But I think RAMP had some data. I think I copied a RAMP chart the other day. I mean, this was Anthropic spend Yeah. On some of their most recent models. The dark blue is Opus five five. And like, hey. What what the ramp data shows is People switch. Yeah. Exactly. And and with with Opus five five, you saw some reacceleration. And so would it surprise me if you saw a reacceleration of revenue and run rate in October, and October won't be in q three, that's the first month of q four? No. It wouldn't surprise me because I do think a lot of the third party data is showing and suggesting that. [00:46:08] S1: Yeah. Well, so... Okay. Let me... This this chart is super interesting. Right? Because you you just said, like, when you when you say stay at the frontier Mhmm. There's different levels of that. Yeah. Stay at the frontier, meaning we're one of the top two, one of the top six, one of top 20, whatever. Mhmm. Mhmm. Usually, people mean top two. Yeah. Usually... But sometimes you can expand and say top six. Yeah. Yeah. Google now has a has a claim Yeah. To be a number one in some metrics. Totally. Meta doing super, super well. SpaceX doing super, super well. Yep. Not at... Not number one. Right. But number three, number four. Yeah. You could say that. Yeah. So look at that, like, summer slump in Yeah. Anthropic revenue. Yeah. Was that because OpenAI was briefly ahead?
00:46:08 · Shawn Wang, Jamin Ball
[00:46:08] S1: Yeah. Well, so... Okay. Let me... This this chart is super interesting. Right? Because you you just said, like, when you when you say stay at the frontier Mhmm. There's different levels of that. Yeah. Stay at the frontier, meaning we're one of the top two, one of the top six, one of top 20, whatever. Mhmm. Mhmm. Usually, people mean top two. Yeah. Usually... But sometimes you can expand and say top six. Yeah. Yeah. Google now has a has a claim Yeah. To be a number one in some metrics. Totally. Meta doing super, super well. SpaceX doing super, super well. Yep. Not at... Not number one. Right. But number three, number four. Yeah. You could say that. Yeah. So look at that, like, summer slump in Yeah. Anthropic revenue. Yeah. Was that because OpenAI was briefly ahead? [00:46:49] S0: Yeah. I mean, I I think Astra was a great model. Yeah. And I think a lot of people started using Astra. And it wasn't just Astra. Right? It was always Google's models. What was the one they just released? Carbon or Argon? [00:47:00] S1: Carbon. Yeah. Carbon Argon. Yesterday? Yeah. Yes. Yes. Next yesterday. They haven't released it yet. This is my gripe at Google. They never released anything. They just announced Yes. A wait list. Yes. And then, like, goddamn it. Like, just
00:47:00 · Shawn Wang, Jamin Ball
[00:47:00] S1: Carbon. Yeah. Carbon Argon. Yesterday? Yeah. Yes. Yes. Next yesterday. They haven't released it yet. This is my gripe at Google. They never released anything. They just announced Yes. A wait list. Yes. And then, like, goddamn it. Like, just [00:47:11] S0: I think I think it was also you saw a massive explosion of, you know, Kimi k three, the GLM series, deep seek models. You saw open weight models get really powerful and and get good quickly. So I think you kind of saw all that. But, like, it's it's crazy. Like, the far right bar, like, what was non opus five five or sonic five five, like, that has gone... That's halved or more. Maybe more, you know, in... What is that? Two, three months. [00:47:41] S1: Yeah. [00:47:41] S0: And so, like, you do... Imagine if they didn't have Opus five five or Sonnet five five. Right? Like, who knows what the revenue growth and trajectory could have been? Yeah. So, like, that's kinda why I do think it's important to be... Have a frontier class Yeah. Style model. [00:47:55] S1: And so I I will say from watching these labs for the past three, four years, they used to have more of a reserve. Yeah. Like, I will have internal models that I can just release whenever I feel like it. Mhmm. And and then I think they... Towards the GPT five, six era, everyone just released whatever they had when they had it. [00:48:15] S0: Right. Right.
00:48:15 · Jamin Ball, Shawn Wang
[00:48:15] S0: Right. Right. [00:48:16] S1: Now I feel like the reserves are building up again. I don't know why, but, like, I... It definitely seems like like, as you saw with the internal model, it it seems like they they have more wood behind the shed for stuff like this. Like, I can really... I am... I am sitting on Fable five five. I can release it the day before I IPO. Yeah. And, like Yeah. Like, that'll that'll make my IPO go well. Yeah. Know? [00:48:35] S0: I mean, look. I I I think there's I think there's good reasons, you know, that the models aren't released right away. You know, on one hand, there is just a lot of, like, safety and alignment and all that. [00:48:45] S1: But as a PM, as an as a as a executive, like, playing this game Yeah. I can play it pretty well if I have a backlog. [00:48:51] S0: I mean... And it's and it's also... Think about, you know, OpenAI's Patch the Planet initiative. Oh, yeah. Which is basically, hey. Let's use these super powerful models to go find vulnerabilities. [00:49:02] S1: Not even. It was five six. It was five six Soul. They found the PHP vulnerability. It wasn't Frontier. Yeah. Which is crazy. It was just a spam a bunch of, like like, our last gen model. [00:49:11] S0: Exactly. Exactly. And then let's let's find all these vulnerabilities like the PHP one. Let's go create the patches so that we can instantaneously release the patch by announcing the vulnerability. The challenge is attackers are using these models, using really powerful open weight models, they're finding these vulnerabilities themselves.