Anthropic S1 had numbers up till Q2. Many people speculated that Q3 numbers were lower because many companies had moved away from "token as measure of productivity" or tokenmaxxing. Anthropic Q3 numbers proved that theory.
As the article notes the growth is still huge. But it has slowed down relative to what they were growing.
We talk about revenue far later in a company’s lifecycle than we did before because high-tech, high-capex companies take a long time to become profitable.
Amazon is now the posterchild for this, but it happens in other industries like pharma a lot too. And in today’s stock market, where a fundamentally weak company like Tesla can trade at eye-watering multiples because of speculation, why worry about profitability at all? (Partly joking but that’s how people think.)
When and why we start expecting Anthropic to be profitable are great questions though.
Amazon has the world on lockdown though as the best place to buy stuff and get almost anything to my house in a day or so. I can use any AI model out there at ever decreasing razor thin margins and there is no moat or lock in at all. Nor do most people even need AI. I’ve certainly never and would never pay for AI anything. Anthropic is basically in the paper business, AI is a commodity at best, but maybe worse, because people actually need paper.
Amazon was unprofitable and not at all dominant for many years before reaching its current status. Books and groceries are also a race to the bottom of margins.
Up 47% quarter over quarter when the previous quarter was up 145% quarter over quarter and close to that the quarter before. "Growth flattened" is generous.
You look at me, you've got nothing left to say
I moan and pout at you until I get my way
I won't dance, you won't sing
I just wanna love you, but you wanna wear my ring
Well, there's nothing I can do
I only wanna be with you
You can call me your fool
I only wanna be with you
Aah! Thanks for reporting! We’ve seen that in a couple of cases. Feel free to reach out to product@kenobi.ai with the site you’re using and we’ll look into it for you.
I'm actually looking forward to a bigger library on Netflix. Happy to pay a few more dollars per month for Netflix instead of managing ephemeral subscriptions to various streaming services.
True for now because models are mainly used to implement features / build small MVPs, which they’re quite good at.
The next step would be to have a model running continuously on a project with inputs from monitoring services, test coverage, product analytics, etc. Such an agent, powered by a sufficient model, could be considered an effective software engineer.
We’re not there today, but it doesn’t seem that far off.
> We’re not there today, but it doesn’t seem that far off.
What time frame counts as "not that far off" to you?
If you tried to bet me that the market for talented software engineers would collapse within the next 10 years, I'd take it no question. 25 years, I think my odds are still better than yours. 50 years, I might not take the bet.
If the niche SaaS product never required a talented engineer in the first place, I'd be inclined to agree with you. But even a niche SaaS product requires a decent amount of engineering skill to maintain well.
I've played around with agent only code bases (where I don't code at all), and had an agent hooked up to server logs, which would create an issue when it encounters errors, and then an agent would fix the tickets, push to prod and check deployment statuses etc. Worked good enough to see that this could easily become the future. (I also had it claude/codex code that whole setup)
Just for semantic nitpicking, I've zero shot heaps of small "software" projects that I use then throw away. Doesn't count as a SAAS product but I would still call it software.
> The next step would be to have a model running continuously on a project with inputs from monitoring services, test coverage, product analytics, etc. Such an agent, powered by a sufficient model, could be considered an effective software engineer.
Building an automated system that determines if a system is correct (whatever that means) is harder to build than the coding agents themselves.
I agree that tooling is maturing towards that end.
I wonder if that same non-technical person that built the MVP with GenAI and requires a (human) technical assistance today, will need it tomorrow as well. Will the tooling be mature enough and lower the barrier enough for anyone to have a complete understanding about software engineering (monitoring services, test coverage, product analytics)?
An operating system UI solves a specific problem: presenting all of your files and applications in a GUI that's flexible enough to support a wide range of fundamental activities.
A company landing page basically has two jobs: (1) sell the product and (2) let existing users access the product.
Applying the OS UI to a company landing page applies the wrong tool to the wrong problem.
The author writes:
> You can multitask, open a few articles simultaneously, and move them around as you please.
> You can be reading the latest newsletter from Product for Engineers while watching a demo video in the corner and also playing Hedgehog Mode, the game.
My browser has tabs – I can open multiple blog posts and read them separately. I don't want to read them while playing a random novelty video game on a SaaS company website.
I commend the author of this website because it is cool and well-designed, but this is not an effective product.
The caveat to this is that the design is thought-provoking. So maybe Posthog gets some buzz and leads because of the discussion among technical people about its new website.
Anthropic released their Q3 numbers today which show:
- $16.96B in revenue Q3
- Up 47% quarter over quarter (Q2 was $11.6B)
- Up >1000% year over year
I wouldn't say their growth "flattened"? Their price drops in September dramatically increased Claude token consumption per OpenRouter
Sources: https://www.anthropic.com/news/s1-sec; https://openrouter.ai/anthropic
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