Vercules

analyst

[Vercules @NextMalotru]

There is no such thing as a good time to IPO

[Vercules @NextMalotru]

@cyrusjohnson Because of multiple arbitrage?

[Vercules @NextMalotru]

@JeffBezos If you are in the 50 to 70th percentile, doesn’t this give you an incentive to earn less money so that you drop into the bottom half? Wouldn’t this incentivize people to be downwardly mobile?

[Vercules @NextMalotru]

Graduating from discussing negative gross margins to discussing negative operating margins is bullish for OAI

[Ed Zitron @edzitron]

Jesus christ, OpenAI had a negative 122% operating margin for Q1 2026 and growth in ChatGPT has stalled.
https://t.co/wud3PKugnV

[Jeff Bezos @JeffBezos]

Thank you. The important part is zeroing out taxes on the bottom half. Best way to put money in someone’s pocket is to not take it out in the first place. Bottom half is only 3% of total tax revenue. But it’s very meaningful to that person. Zero it out.

[Vercules @NextMalotru]

DTC food brands are mostly hyper processed garbage

[Vercules @NextMalotru]

with anthropic, this is where the math stops making sense

raising $50B today 3 months after their last raise, the economics are quite poor

they plan to raise $60B in Q4 - this buys them a few more months

the end result is they have to raise prices, and significantly too

[Vercules @NextMalotru]

a potential timeline:

postponing ipo

too afraid to file an S1 revealing the real economics of the biz

raising capital again so quickly implies high burn bc of neg gross margin

negative gm + compute constrained leads to increased prices

usage scales back

bubble bursts

[Techmeme @Techmeme]

Sources: Anthropic has begun weighing a new funding round at a $900B+ valuation, after previously resisting investor proposals at an $800B+ valuation (Bloomberg)

(Visit Techmeme dot com for the link and full context!)

[Vercules @NextMalotru]

they don’t offer a peer to peer marketplace

Instead they do long term pieces with neoclouds and then sell it piecemeal to startups

They’re compute resellers, arbitraging the price differentials from long term contracts to short term ones

Marketplace is misleading, they’re not Airbnb for compute

[Vercules @NextMalotru]

@AnjneyMidha @amppublic @CS153Systems two ideas:

1) khan academy for electricians/plumbers/etc

2) open sourcing more of the intricacies of the industry (for instance what would an open source semianalysis look like)

[Vercules @NextMalotru]

either field of tokenomics (economics of ai tokens) is woefully underdeveloped, or all the best analysis is behind paywalls of the most expensive kind

[Vercules @NextMalotru]

capital as a moat -> compute as a moat

[Vercules @NextMalotru]

@matt_slotnick OpenAI would say no - the some web of complicated (and potentially selfish) deals woven by Sam, which is now motivating the board to consider others, is the same reason no one else is a good fit. Sam is the sole dealmaker to deliver the final package

[Vercules @NextMalotru]

I expect that Jensens back and forth in dwarkesh will have massive ripple effects on American geo-policy relating to chips

His emphatic defense of supplying chips to china, whether cogent from an economics standpoint or not, will confirm many existing biases in Washington

Technology founder leaders view China as a customer first and foremost, a foreign adversary as second if at all

[Vercules @NextMalotru]

what is the public market float available to ingest spacex, anthropic and oai in the event they all IPO within a quarter of each other?

[Vercules @NextMalotru]

Box ceo has extremely lucid takes about AI from running… Box?

[Vercules @NextMalotru]

@bubbleboi then why does Nvidia continue to fund (and bailout?) companies like Coreweave and Nebius ?

[Vercules @NextMalotru]

Anthropic’s poor compute planning is the forcing function that’s motivating them to go after the application layer so aggressively

All indications are that Anthropic is compute constrained (1.5GW) for the foreseeable future. They are correcting for this (see contract with Coreweave announced last week), but it will take time

Until such time, they have to consistently squeeze out more top-line from their existing 1.5GW in order to maintain the current, insane growth trajectory (which they have to maintain for most optimal IPO outcome)

The most straightforward method to do this is to identify the highest commercial use/traction on their API users (internal growth compass) and go copy those products perfectly, which they are doing.

The closest comparable in recent memory would be Amazon creating generic versions of the best selling consumer goods on their platform and selling it under “Basics”

If you believe compute supply will grow at a slower rate than demand for Anthropic products, one thing will remain true, Anthropic will systematically go upstream until they have captured every dollar of margin being generated by others in the stack

The end state is eliminating their API access altogether and funnel all scarce compute towards their own branded products/services

[Vercules @NextMalotru]

@catboosted presumes that brand loyalty and distribution isn’t a moat here, and that is likely correct

[Vercules @NextMalotru]

@arankomatsuzaki enough with the vaguemaxxing, why is the application layer worthless