Anthropic is the company that makes the most noise about AI safety, in all the good and bad ways. While being THE frontier model player to watch.

They got way less resources than OpenAI. They don't have the infinite compute or the biggest userbase. And they still punch way above their weight with just about every release.

Yeah, I would be curious to know what kind of returns they’re seeing from Isomorphic labs given AlphaFold itself is publicly available. From what I’ve read, the deals they’ve reached with the major Pharma companies could result in billions in returns, but they come as royalties or are tied to performance metrics. It’s going to be hard to know how valuable the investments made in this space will be for probably another decade.

I agree with you for the most part. However they have been raising a lot of cash, and to do so they took on a ton of debt.

It's a totally reasonable investment as long as they are within shooting distance of the market leaders, but the more they lag behind (i.e. the longer it takes for them to release their next model on par with industry leaders) the more hurt they're going to be in.

If they can't materialize returns off the tens of billions of dollars they just raised then it will come back to bite them hard.

Luckily they have a ton of options (such as selling compute) but it's still not a great look and the market is going to hammer them given the opportunity.

> they have world class research

It's a pretty bad look when all they do is shed researchers. Whether to other labs, or to people launching their own things. "I work at Google" doesn't have the ring it had 10-20 years ago either, something that OAI and especially Anthropic enjoy nowadays.

Deepmind is looking less and less like a place of prestige, and more and more like a smash-and-grab.