Posted by simonw 5/27/2026
Funny to see the change of tone - a lesson for people not to get too ahead of themselves.
You financially benefit from stuff like agents. Of course you will be the last to admit publicly when things aren’t quite heading in the right direction. The gap between hype and reality is ever increasing.
The models are putting in work, that's indisputable, the thing I'm calling out is that Anthropic's price and hype are running ahead of the value it's delivering. Agents are a great boost at <=5% of SWE salary, a mediocre tradeoff/risk at 20%+, and insane at SV tokenmaxxing levels.
I notice this all over the place. Many people hate AI and want it to fail, and they're willing to invent misinformation if it supports that idea.
I repeat: a CTO saying that they spent their entire AI budget for 2026 when that budget was clearly set in 2025 before anyone knew what those November models + harnesses were capable of is entirely unsurprising. Any analysis that doesn't also point out the difference between 2025 and 2026 era coding agents is either ignorant or deliberately misleading.
(We still don't even know what Uber's planned AI budget for 2026 was. They didn't reveal that when asked - in https://www.theinformation.com/newsletters/applied-ai/uber-c... it says "He wouldn’t disclose exact figures of the company’s software budget or what it spends on AI coding tools").
https://www.businessinsider.com/uber-coo-andrew-macdonald-ai...
You know their business is literally correct interpretation of the C-Suite statements.
Hah, I just checked their homepage and here they go again amplifying that COO fragment from that podcast:
https://www.businessinsider.com/tokenmaxxing-debate-uber-exe...
> "That link is not there yet, right?" Macdonald said in comments that went viral, racking up over 2 million views on X. "I think maybe implicitly there is more that is getting shipped, but it's very hard to draw a line between one of those stats and, 'OK, now we're actually producing 25% more useful consumer features.'"
Yeah, something going "viral on X" is clearly a sign that it's quality information!
For someone who cares about media hype - https://hn.algolia.com/?query=author%3Ahansmayer%20hype&type... - you don't seem to be very discerning with regards to this particular story.
There's a whole bag of clever tricks you can play to juice short term results leading to an IPO that may not work longer term.
I'll believe they've found product-market fit when they have a product. Right now they're selling the infrastructure, in a highly subsidized and undifferentiated way (at least over a sufficient long period of time of, say, a couple of years).
The fact is that investment is at a scale so large that current trajectories are nowhere near going to provide ROI.
The model companies are trying to milk every drop of ARR they can before IPOing. That is entirely the current narrative. You can hurt ARR before it churns if your goals are short term.
Anthropic being profitable is laughable. Sure, by some accounting measure that no one seriously uses. But looking at revenue and what they’re raising you can see the true story.
The truth is we need a revolutionary step up in capability to justify capex spend. It’s possible that might come - Opus 4.5 brought one - but failing that we’ll see the bubble pop once the IPO pumping is done.