Ben_West🔸 comments on Against Credulous AI Hype

[Ben_West🔸]

Wiblin does not explain where his estimate of ‘hundreds of billions of dollars’ of revenue comes from, but it reads to me like pure marketing for potential investors

You quote him as observing that their revenue tripled over the past 3 months, and some basic math tells us that another ~tripling gets them to $100B.

I’m in favor of rigor and would also have preferred him to share a more detailed model, but “pure marketing for potential investors” seems like an unfair characterization of a “predict trends will continue unchanged” forecast.

Edit: I’ve listened to the podcast and now think your framing is unfair to the point of being misleading. He says:

And also keep in mind that on Monday — the day before Anthropic published all of this — we learned that their annualised revenue run rate had grown from $9 billion at the end of December to $30 billion just three months later. That’s 3.3x growth in a single quarter — perhaps the fastest revenue growth rate for a company of that size ever recorded.

That exploding revenue is a pretty good proxy for how much more useful the previous release, Opus 4.6, has become for real-world tasks. If the past relationship between capability measures and usefulness continues to hold, the economic impact of Mythos once it becomes available is going to dwarf everything that came before it — which is part of why Anthropic’s decision not to release it is a serious one, and actually quite a costly one for them.

They’re sitting on something that would likely push their revenue run rate into the hundreds of billions, but they’ve decided it’s simply not worth the risk.

He very straightforwardly seems to be explaining where his estimate comes from to me?