Until the funding stops for one reason or another and then everyone loses all their money at once like a star that collapses into a black hole singularity in a femtosecond.
It’s the new kids in the block that will make the difference.
You know those lists on twitter about how many companies US has in top 10 and are presented as a win? Those are actually lists of capital concentrations blocking innovation. It looks like US is winning but for some reason life is better in EU and innovation is faster in China.
It’s companies like OpenAI Anthropic that will move US ahead. Even if some core innovation or and capital comes from the establishment.
Step 1, find something to innovate on, sell the promise of it to investors. Step 2, build a prototype or worst case, build it for real and start generating income from your truly innovate and unique product. Step 3, get acquired by a large company and then shut down because your product competed with theirs.
End result, general public possibly benefited from your innovation, but in the long run, it was temporary.
Maybe the incentives would be better if it were harder for large companies to acquire small ones? If the path to riches where driven primarily by delivering value to customers. Would love to hear other's opinions on this.
"Get bankrolled by the state at the state's discretion until they get what they want, even if they need to burn $1B to get $1M of value"
and in Europe it's
"Just buy it from the US or China".
If that's how it worked, they wouldn't lead in anything, they'd be bankrupt already. They burn state money like VCs burn cash. DeepSeek, Alibaba, Tencent, Xiaomi, Huawei, etc., disprove your point.
Ghost cities, empty high speed rail lines, solar cells being mass produced at a loss.
All these things also produced end products the state wanted, no doubt. But the capital allocation strategy is basically a "throw all the money the leader gives in that direction until the leader says stop".
In the long term, big kids win no? The big kids are also going to have an easier time with hardware at scale too
The GP was talking about Google specifically, and their outcomes on AI are nothing to scoff at. They had a rocky late start, but they seem to have gotten over that. Their models are now very much competitive with the startups. And it's not just that have more money to spend. They probably have more training data than anyone in the world, and they also have more infrastructure, more manpower, more of a global footprint than the startups.
The Innovator's Dilemma is an anecdotal, maybe a statistical relationship at best, but not a fundamental law of nature. When an established company has everything it should take to become a leader in a new industry in theory, and in practice their products are already on par with the industry leaders, you know at some point it becomes rational to think that maybe they might become a leader.
NVIDIA, and contractors who build data centers, and manufacturers who supply them, will all get rich.
As measured by prosperity life in the US is better; the poorest US state has a higher GDP per capita than most western European countries. Americans have bigger houses, more food, bigger cars, bigger salaries, and access to better medical care and schools if they've got an okay job. Most Europeans are lucky to make $40k/year post-tax. And America is still winning on innovation because its AI models are ahead of China's both in benchmarks and in user preferences. How many people do you know professionally who use a Chinese model and agent framework instead of e.g. Claude Code or OpenAI Codex?
Yeah, so I don't want to be a Debbie Downer, but as a European who visited the US, your food is definitely not something I would use as an example of your QoL.
I believe this cultural divide is a big reason America won't make it back to the top - insatiable desire for wealth and a lack of values-based principals. Ironically US companies are the first to tout their 'values' in the workplace.
If you are in the top 30% of earners, the US is better.
What top are you referring to?
We're in a thread about a US company announcing its new $30B fundraise from a group of elite US growth investment funds arguing about whether this company will be able to overthrow $4T US tech behemoth and suggesting that all the other US tech behemoths are actually stifling progress.
I gotta say, I found this one especially funny as I currently don't have a car and that's actually my biggest luxury: being able to go around without one and no spending time in commute.
Here in Canada if I have an accident i do not have to worry about being bankrupt if the ambulance brings me to the wrong hospital.
I am really not enthusiastic about the so-called superior quality of life some US-ians like to boast about.
Why? I live in the US. I have the best healthcare coverage in the world. I pay absolutely nothing for it, ever. No matter the cost. And I have access tot he best doctors, innovations, and technology in the world.
Tell me again why your friend would be dead? It sounds like you really have a poor understanding of American health care.
GDP per capita/prosperity is a poor proxy for quality of life. The US is lagging most of the developed world in most quality of life metrics, even as reported by US news outlets, which don't rank the US in even the top 20: https://www.usnews.com/news/best-countries/rankings/quality-...
>Americans have bigger houses, more food, bigger cars,
The size of one's house or car is at best weakly-correlated with quality of life. I would rather not own a car at all and be able to walk everywhere, rather than spend hours of my life commuting in a gigantic SUV.
>bigger salaries, and access to better medical care and schools if they've got an okay job.
The US ranks the lowest in the developed world for life expectancy, and among the highest in obesity globally (obesity being a major determinant of health). The US remains the only developed country where an unlucky dice roll (e.g. genetic-linked cancer) will bankrupt you and destroy the livelihoods of your children.
This is not the flex you think it is.
The product they released so far are all half assed experiments.
Gemini 3 Pro is now being beaten by open source models because they can't fix or don't want to fix the problems with the Gemini models being completely useless.
The same for Microsoft.
Microsoft had GitHub Copilot, and Microsoft Copilot and both of them are useless to Claude Code and Claude Cowork.
You can have all the money in the world, but nothing is stopping you from building useless garbage.
Gemini is absurdly expensive for low quality (3000 USD of tokens are not even worth what you get @ Anthropic for 200 USD).
So maybe Google is lagging on truly new products (btw, does Gemini itself with its TPUs count as a new product? I'd say yes), but "old" products are entrenched enough to carry them and compete.
chromeos is 17
android is 18
chrome is 18
google docs is 20
google translate is 20
Look to GCP as an example. It had to be done, with similar competitive dynamics, it was done very well.
Look to Android as another.
I've yet to see anything that threatens Google's ad monopoly.
It's not that a dominant position goes away overnight. In fact that would be precisely the impetus to spur the incumbent to pivot immediately and have a much better chance of winning in the new paradigm.
It's that it, with some probability, gets eaten away slowly and the incumbent therefore cannot let go of the old paradigm, eventually losing their dominance over some period of years.
So nobody really knows how LLMs will change the search paradigm and the ads business models downstream of that, we're seeing that worked out in real time right now, but it's definitely high enough probability that Google see it and (crucially) have the shareholder mandate to act on it.
That's the existential threat and they're navigating it pretty well so far. The strategy seems balanced, measured, and correct. As the situation evolves I think they have every chance of actually not being disrupted should it come to that.
In my opinion though this is a race to the bottom rather than a winner takes all situation so I don't think anyone is coming out ahead once the dust settles.
No comment on Google+, Google has a storied history of failure on any kind of social media/chat type products.
Where Google wins is just simply having enough money to outlive anyone else. As the saying goes "the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent" In this case, Google is the market and they can just keep throwing money at the wall until OpenAI, Anthropic, etc. go under.
And there was collaborative editing long before Google Wave.
Google makes money selling ads. Nothing else matters.
The current AI market is going to destroy anyone who's specialized into it compared to having alternative revenue streams to subsidize it.
They're engaged in computing research and merely engage in consumer capitalism as a consequence of political and social constraints.
Products are a means to an end not the goal.
OpenAI and Anthropic are product companies and are more likely to fail like most product companies do as they will lack broad and wide depth.
Google has experience in design, implementation, and 24/7 ops with every type of SaaS there is. They can bin LLMs tomorrow and still make bank. Same cannot be said for OAI or Anthropic.
Google does things I hate with their products. But the money printing machine keeps going whrrr faster and faster.
Some technical advancements are not worth it if you do not respect your users.
OpenAI figured this out: it’s awesome marketing when people send each other links to the app with a convenient text box to continue the conversation. It’s viral.
Google meanwhile set this up so that “anyone with the link can view” is actually “anyone with the link and a Google account”.
That’s grade A failure of marketing.
The PM in charge of that decision ought to be walked off a plank.
E.g.: https://aistudio.google.com/app/prompts?state=%7B%22ids%22:%...
Some of the Big Techs are building their own in house stuff (Meta, Google), but it wouldn't be crazy to see acquisitions by the others, especially if the market cools slightly. And then there's the possibility that these companies mature their revenue streams enough to start actually really throwing off money and paying off the investment.
I wouldn't argue it's that risky. Look at their past entanglements:
1. Google Default Search Bribe - brings in $20B a year for literally doing nothing
2. Google Maps: Google let them build their own custom app using Google's backend, and it worked fine all the way up until Apple chose to exit that arrangement
actually I can't think of any others, but is there an example of Apple getting burned by Google?
$200/mo is nothing compared to what that time is worth. and it keeps getting better with each model release, which is the opposite of what usually happens when you pay for developer tools (they get acquired, enshittified, or abandoned).
the meta point about this funding round imo: competition between anthropic, openai, and google is the best thing happening for small builders right now. it keeps the tools improving fast and pricing competitive. if any one of them had a monopoly we'd be paying 10x for worse output.
It’s the same reason Reid Hoffman sold his AI startup early… he realized he just couldn’t beat Google/FB/MSFT long term if it devolved into a money race.
Basically "we have youtube subscribers" is the only thing that isn't all about AI, but even that i'm sure they're trying to figure out how to shoehorn AI into that product
Wild although not entirely surprising. Congrats, Anthropic.
Tech stocks with all the hype are second only to crypto in terms of how easy and fast are to sell (hence BTC dropped and now tech stocks IMHO).
Btw, I was too young to fully remember, but wasn't the year before the dot com crash also full of IPOs?
And thinking about it it makes sense since the decision to pay the outrageous rates for an ad during the Superbowl must be driven by strong emotions (confidence or desperation). In this case, considering there's no clear moat for any of the big players, I believe it's the latter.
If you give me $1T to spend, I, too, can probably make $14B (this is a metaphor)
What if their strategy is this: slowly drive down software stocks, keep talking about AI, buy the downward market. Then cash in on the IPOs of OpenAI and Anthropic.
Then let OpenAI and Anthropic implode. Goldman Sachs had no problems underwriting webvan at the end of 1999, which then imploded in 2000.
Anyway, I just valued my dog at $1 billion post-money. You can buy it at pets.com.
Because we live in the worst possible timeline the end result for AI companies does seem to be "too big to fail", where these massive investments will get foisted on working class people via a bailout or an IPO and index inclusion.
My sense is that startup mission statements are ~meaningless. Builders try to build great things that lots of other people will find valuable.
Beat OpenAI. The Founders came from OpenAI so there was obviously some disagreement about the direction there or they simply wanted more control.
But I guess it's easier to make a glib comment than look these things up.
Google used to have a motto "don't be evil"
Who enforces the definition of language? Who demands compliance?
Soon as we go down the path of policing and insistence on one true dogma, we veer into religious holy war type behavior.
Obsession with semantics of syntax is a sort of theism even if the syntax and semantics do not refer to the commonly accepted tropes of a specific religion.
I'm not a lawyer (I don't even play one on TV, damn you Odenkirk) so I can't tell you what that means as far as case law for companies getting punished for behaving badly, but in this case, there is supposedly some sort of legal backing for the classification.
Numerous companies have tried and failed competing with SoTA foundational models. If Anthropic had no moat, Apple and Meta wouldn't be paying them billions for coding asistance.
Meta, Amazon, Apple, and Nvidia would all have SoTA competitors to Claude. They all tried and have not produced a competitor.
Instead you have three companies that stand alone making billions from foundational models.
Two years ago, I considered investing in Anthropic when they had a valuation of around $18B and messed up by chickening out (it was available on some of the private investor platforms). Up 20x since then ...
It was always obvious that Anthropic's focus on business/API usage had potential to scale faster than OpenAI's focus on ChatGPT, but the real kicker has been Claude Code (released a year ago).
It'd be interesting to know how Anthropic's revenue splits between Claude Code, or coding in general, other API usage, and chat (which I assume is small).
If you are NOT knowledgeable and simply have money ... well it'll soon be parted.
https://www.thesaasnews.com/news/databricks-raises-1b-series...
This was in the middle of the boom when companies were fighting over talent, so I found it odd.
Only for well defined tasks. There's not really a practical upper bound. We will keep throwing more complex tasks at it to the extent that it can handle them. Like if you just need fancy OCR, then a specific model will probably suffice, but there will be an appetite for human- or superhuman-level intelligence that never gets tired and has no rights.
SaaS and legal market caps have already contracted a multiple of the combined OpenAI + Anthropic valuations just based on the _threat_ of what they may be able to accomplish.
They'll have the data + knowledge edge over open alternatives and be able to implement + deploy (see the story about Anthropic employees being at GS for 6 months already[0])
[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2026/02/06/anthropic-goldman-sachs-ai-m...
+ r&d costs
Of course, if one does not "pay" for investment, benefits are easily made ..
But project out forwards.
- What happens when Google builds a similar model? Or even Meta, as far behind as they are? They have more than Anthropic in cash flow to pour into these models.
- What happens when OSS is "enough" for most cases? Why would anyone pay 60% margins on inference?
What is Anthropic's moat? The UX is nice, but it can be copied. And other companies will have similarly intelligent models eventually. Margins will then be a race to the bottom, and the real winners will be GPU infra.
Others are made of different stuff, and are going to go right back to work, even though they could go off to a beach for the rest of forever somewhere.
As millipede, clearly therefore millicorn.
Looks like major uptake from businesses. But all these articles keep saying there isn’t any actual value creation?
Citation needed.
That isn’t nothing.
Valuation behemoth OpenAI has been forced by the market to use Anthropic standards a couple times, having no comparable solutions of their own.
… I can see it.
The fish rots from the head and marketing depends on being relatable.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qMAg8_yf9zA
Take a scroll through the comments.
These are all moats.
Source??
seems like there are a lot of those out there these days, and the costs are falling
> a massive concentration of talent and experience
Apparently 3000 employees? There's plenty of talent to be found elsewhere. Plus employees can be hired away.
> brand
meh.
> one of, if not the best, coding experiences
Seems easy enough to replicate, given how quickly they built it.
wonder how much of that $30B will make it their way and pay that down