Comment by andrewl-hn 18 hours ago
I’ll be honest, while I have my doubts about the match of interests and cohesion between an AI company and a JS runtime company I have to say this is the single best acquisition announcement blog post I’ve seen in 20 years or so.
Very direct, very plain and detailed. They cover all the bases about the why, the how, and what to expect. I really appreciate it.
Best of luck to the team and hopefully the new home will support them well.
Anthropic may be losing money, but a company with $7bn revenue run rate (https://www.anthropic.com/news/statement-dario-amodei-americ...) is a whole lot healthier than a company with a revenue of 0.
If I had the cash, I could sell dollar bills for 50 cents and do a $7b run rate :)
If that was genuinely happening here - Anthropic were selling inference for less than the power and data center costs needed to serve those tokens - it would indeed be a very bad sign for their health.
I don't think they're doing that.
Estimates I've seen have their inference margin at ~60% - there's one from Morgan Stanley in this article, for example: https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-anthropic-billions-cl...
you have anthropic confused with something like lovable.
anthropic's unit margins are fine, many lovable-like businesses are not.
I am fairly skeptical about many AI companies, but as someone else pointed out, Anthropic has 10x'ed their revenue for the past 3 years. 100m->1b->10b. While past performance no predictor of future results, their product is solid and to me looks like they have found PMF.
Often it happens that VCs buy out companies from funds belonging to a fresh because the selling fund wants to show performance to their investors until "the big one", or move cash one from wealthy pocket to another one.
"You buy me this, next time I save you on that", etc...
"Raised $19 million Series A led by Khosla Ventures + $7 million"
"Today, Bun makes $0 in revenue."
Everything is almost public domain (MIT) and can be forked without paying a single dollar.
Questionable to claim that the technology is the real reason this was bought.
It's an acquihire. If Anthropic is spending significant resources, or see that they will have to, to improve Bun internally already it makes a lot of sense. No nefarious undertones required.
An analogous example off the top of my head is Shopify hired Rafael Franca to work on Rails full-time.
If it was an acquihire, still a lot less slimy than just offering the employees they care about a large compensation package and leaving the company behind as a husk like Amazon, Google and Microsoft have done recently.
> But how is another company that is also VC backed and losing money providing stability for Bun?
Reminds me of when Tron, the crypto company, bought BitTorrent.
I misread Amazon, implying that Amazon might buy Anthropic, and I think that's what will end up happening.
In my three or four non chatbot related projects, I’ve found Amazon’s Nova models to be just as good as Anthropic’s.
Ditto, and I got to know Bun via HN. It seemed intriguing, but also "why another JS runtime" etc.
If Bun embraces the sweet spot around edge computing, modern JS/TS and AI services, I think their future ahead looks bright.
Bun seems more alive than Deno, FWIW.
One thing I like about this, despite it meaning Bun will be funded, is Anthropic is a registered public benefit corporation. While this doesn't mean Anthropic cant fuck over the users of Bun, it at least puts in some roadblocks. The path of least-resistance here should be to improve Bun for users, not to monetize it to the point where it's no longer valuable.
But how is another company that is also VC backed and losing money providing stability for Bun?
How long before we hear about “Our Amazing Journey”?
On the other hand, I would rather see someone like Bun have a successful exit where the founders seem to have started out with a passion project, got funding, built something out they were excited about and then exit than yet another AI company by non technical founders who were built with the sole purpose of getting funding and then exit.