Anthropic’s Dario Amodei ‘not super fussed’ about market turmoil ahead of IPO

{"text":[[{"start":10.94,"text":"Anthropic is “not super fussed” about market volatility disrupting the AI lab’s blockbuster initial public offering in less than a week’s time, chief executive Dario Amodei said in an interview with JPMorgan boss Jamie Dimon on Friday."}],[{"start":25.7,"text":"The company is planning to go public on Thursday on the tech-heavy Nasdaq in the teeth of highly volatile trading. US markets have been rocked by anxiety about the sustainability of the AI boom and the sudden resignation of Nvidia boss Jensen Huang."}],[{"start":39.4,"text":"“We’re not super fussed on when exactly, what month or what day, or what market conditions we go public into,” Amodei told bankers and partners at an event with Dimon organised by JPMorgan, ahead of a listing expected to value Anthropic at about $1.5tn."}],[{"start":56.52,"text":"The market ructions led Anthropic investors to trim their valuation outlook from the more than $2tn many expected over the summer. Amodei said his approach to pricing the IPO was “never let your company be worth a single dollar more than it’s really worth”."}],[{"start":70.9,"text":"The Anthropic co-founder added that the listing was a way for the company to maximise its cash on hand and ensure it could meet huge spending plans for new computing power and infrastructure."}],[{"start":80.12,"text":"“Compute is the deepest business dilemma that the company faces,” said Amodei. Anthropic could raise a record-breaking $100bn or more in the IPO and a simultaneous private placement deal."}],[{"start":91.84,"text":"“This field is growing so fast from a technological perspective and we don’t know how that is going to transfer to the creation of economic value on the business side . . . We don’t know what’s going to happen next year,” he added."}],[{"start":null,"text":"

"}],[{"start":103.94,"text":"The five-year-old company had more than $130bn in cash on hand at the end of September. The IPO, which is oversubscribed, could almost double that and give Anthropic a “buffer” to meet its planned $900bn in infrastructure spending over the coming years, and to deal with any shocks."}],[{"start":119.24,"text":"Amodei acknowledged that the “commitments are very large”. But he said the spending may be too conservative compared with the company’s growth prospects, in which case Anthropic would buy additional compute in the short-term “spot market”."}],[{"start":133.36,"text":"Anthropic has struck deals with Elon Musk’s SpaceX worth as much as $3.1bn per month to use the rocket maker’s data centre capacity. Short-term deals such as the arrangement with Musk “cost more but we’re buying it in a world where we’re doing particularly well”, said Amodei."}],[{"start":151.08,"text":"The Anthropic boss also said he was not concerned about advanced AI becoming a commodity, which would erode the lab’s lead over rivals. While the market for certain applications, such as chatbots or coding tools, might become saturated, Amodei told Dimon he was confident that exponential growth in cognitive power or AI would open new markets."}],[{"start":173.04,"text":"JPMorgan is an underwriter on Anthropic’s listing, managing sales to retail investors in the US. Amodei told the assembled bankers at the group’s New York offices that his biggest preoccupation was cultivating Anthropic’s culture."}],[{"start":185.28,"text":"“We don’t want people who are jerks. We don’t want people who try to steal the show and don’t work well with others. We don’t want people who aren’t oriented towards the public benefit.”"}],[{"start":199.98,"text":""}]],"url":"https://audio.ftcn.net.cn/album/a_1794620930_9824.mp3"}