Latest / Best of Business / Sam Dickie: Fisher Funds expert on Anthropic potentially becoming one of the biggest IPOs on record

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Sam Dickie: Fisher Funds expert on Anthropic potentially becoming one of the biggest IPOs on record · Best of Business

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  Speaker 1: You're listening to a podcast from News Talks b follow
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  Speaker 2: Sam Dickey from Fisher Funds is with us.
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  Speaker 3: Hello, Sam, good evening head.
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  Speaker 2: Anthropic in it? How did it grow so fast?
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  Speaker 3: Yes, anthropic and yeah we had just heard about to
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  Speaker 3: chat gpt for years and anthropic was it makes the
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  Speaker 3: aissistant Claude. It was founded in twenty twenty one, interestingly
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  Speaker 3: by a group of AI researchers who walked out of
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  Speaker 3: open ai, who make chat gpt, who said that open
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  Speaker 3: ai had had safety concerns and the growth is hard
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  Speaker 3: to comprehend. So it was about nine billion dollars of
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  Speaker 3: annualized revenue at the start of this year, fifty billion
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  Speaker 3: in May and is tracking towards a run rate of
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  Speaker 3: over one hundred billion by December. And they won by
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  Speaker 3: going after something pretty unglamorous, which is writing computer code.
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  Speaker 3: They went all in on that and Claude code now
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  Speaker 3: writes roughly one in every ten lines of code published
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  Speaker 3: on the internees. And if you think about coding, it's
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  Speaker 3: one of the stickiest things you can sell because once
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  Speaker 3: code has built their workflow around your tool, moving off
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  Speaker 3: it's pretty painful. And the other thing is the safety
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  Speaker 3: obsession they got from when they left open Ai has
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  Speaker 3: become a sales advantage. So if you're a big global
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  Speaker 3: bank like JP Morgan buying AI, you have to satisfy
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  Speaker 3: your risk committee. So being the careful one has got
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  Speaker 3: the more big customers faster.
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  Speaker 1: Now.
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  Speaker 2: AI companies are not known for actually making money. So
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  Speaker 2: does Anthropic make any Yeah, and that's a real surprise.
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  Speaker 3: And we got some new numbers yesterday. So for the
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  Speaker 3: Dune quarter, And when I say we got some new numbers,
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  Speaker 3: we got some new numbers leaked via the Wall Street Journal.
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  Speaker 3: But for the Dune quarter, Anthropic did almost twice the
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  Speaker 3: revenue of open ai and at more than doubled versus March,
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  Speaker 3: while open Ai grew less than twenty percent. So that's
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  Speaker 3: the first time that Anthropics being bigger on a revenue basis,
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  Speaker 3: and on a profit basis, it's even starker. So Anthropic
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  Speaker 3: is talking about making a small operating profit in the
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  Speaker 3: June quarter, while open ai is lost wider into twelve
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  Speaker 3: billion dollars. And the why is pretty simple. Anthropic doesn't
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  Speaker 3: have hundreds of millions of people using it for free
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  Speaker 3: so chet GPT is being more focused on the consumer,
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  Speaker 3: and most of anthropics customers are businesses and they generate
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  Speaker 3: three to five times more revenue per query than open
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  Speaker 3: ai does.
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  Speaker 2: And so why is it that the founder then spends
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  Speaker 2: all of this time warning us about how dangerous his
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  Speaker 2: own product is.
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  Speaker 3: Yeah, Dario, So again they left sort of chet gpt,
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  Speaker 3: open ai and protest over over the danger that they
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  Speaker 3: were running there. And he has talked about AI being
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  Speaker 3: catastrophically dangerous while racing to build it as fast as
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  Speaker 3: he can. So his answer to that question is essentially,
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  Speaker 3: someone's going to do this, it's better that it's us,
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  Speaker 3: which is either principled yet not very humble or extremely convenient,
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  Speaker 3: depends on your view. And just this week he argued
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  Speaker 3: that AI backlash is a crisis of trust and that
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  Speaker 3: AI companies need to act actually cure cancer to earn
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  Speaker 3: public confidence. But the timing is really interesting. So Google's
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  Speaker 3: AI boss has publicly told the doom sayers they've been
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  Speaker 3: way too certain and should tone it down. And sure enough,
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  Speaker 3: with these big floats coming up, the industry has gone
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  Speaker 3: quiet on danger allowed on the upside. And finally, the
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  Speaker 3: other thing he's been doing is he backs strict government
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  Speaker 3: pre approval testing for frontier AI models. And that's really
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  Speaker 3: hard on small competitors chasing anthropic and much easier for
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  Speaker 3: this massive company.
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  Speaker 2: Okay, what should investors take from this?
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  Speaker 3: Well, it was worth less than a billion dollars, less
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  Speaker 3: than a trillion dollar back in May, about nine hundred
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  Speaker 3: and sixty five billion, and now the market is talking
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  Speaker 3: two trillion by October, which is quite extraordinary. And on
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  Speaker 3: my rough mass it's about twenty times revenue, which is
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  Speaker 3: incidentally almost exactly what SpaceX is trading at. And why
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  Speaker 3: the rush? Why are they in such a rush to
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  Speaker 3: list again? You and I have spoken about this many times.
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  Speaker 3: They need enormous capital for computing and the windows open
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  Speaker 3: the Dutch quacking. Just one final thing is on the
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  Speaker 3: moat that we talk about often. The best AI model,
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  Speaker 3: according to you know, independent benchmarks, is change hands every
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  Speaker 3: six months for three years, and sixty percent of big
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  Speaker 3: companies deliberately run two more providers. So while this company
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  Speaker 3: may be the most successful tech company ever certainly in
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  Speaker 3: terms of the pace of its revenue, the jury is
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  Speaker 3: still owed on how sustainable that motor.
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  Speaker 2: Is very interesting, Sam as always appreciate talking to you.
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  Speaker 2: Sam Dicky Official Funds
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