I agree it’s common for startups to somewhat oversell their products to investors, but I think it goes far beyond “somewhat”—maybe even beyond the bar for criminal fraud, though I’m not sure—to tell investors you’re aiming to soon get “too far ahead for anyone to catch up in subsequent cycles,” if your actual plan is to avoid getting meaningfully ahead at all.
Not making any claims about actual Anthropic strategy here, but as gwern notes, I don’t think that these are necessarily contradictory. For example, you could have a strategy of getting far enough ahead that new entrants like e.g. Mistral would have a hard time keeping up, but staying on pace with or behind current competitors like e.g. OpenAI.
I assumed “anyone” was meant to include OpenAI—do you interpret it as just describing novel entrants? If so I agree that wouldn’t be contradictory, but it seems like a strange interpretation to me in the context of a pitch deck asking investors for a billion dollars.
I agree that this is a plausible read of their pitch to investors, but I do think it’s a bit of a stretch to consider it the most likely explanation. It’s hard for me to believe that Anthropic would receive billions of dollars in funding if they’re explicitly telling investors that they’re committingto only release equivalent or inferior products relative to their main competitor.
I agree it’s common for startups to somewhat oversell their products to investors, but I think it goes far beyond “somewhat”—maybe even beyond the bar for criminal fraud, though I’m not sure—to tell investors you’re aiming to soon get “too far ahead for anyone to catch up in subsequent cycles,” if your actual plan is to avoid getting meaningfully ahead at all.
Not making any claims about actual Anthropic strategy here, but as gwern notes, I don’t think that these are necessarily contradictory. For example, you could have a strategy of getting far enough ahead that new entrants like e.g. Mistral would have a hard time keeping up, but staying on pace with or behind current competitors like e.g. OpenAI.
I assumed “anyone” was meant to include OpenAI—do you interpret it as just describing novel entrants? If so I agree that wouldn’t be contradictory, but it seems like a strange interpretation to me in the context of a pitch deck asking investors for a billion dollars.
I agree that this is a plausible read of their pitch to investors, but I do think it’s a bit of a stretch to consider it the most likely explanation. It’s hard for me to believe that Anthropic would receive billions of dollars in funding if they’re explicitly telling investors that they’re committing to only release equivalent or inferior products relative to their main competitor.