The burn barrel

 

Photo by Chris Rhoads on Unsplash

The Anthropic IPO reminds yours truly of using a burn barrel to burn up past taxes when appropriate. In the start phase, you use tinder or lighter fluid to get the burn going. After that, the burn gets crazy as burn barrels have holes to encourage the burn. At the end, you stoke the fire to take care of the remnants as the Anthropic play reminds me of the stoking phase as the bond guys are getting twitchy while Anthropic whistles past the graveyard in hopes of keeping the musical chairs charade going. 

Here's what we know about Anthropic's current IPO plans. Credit: VCG/VCG via Getty Images 

Unlike its biggest competitor, OpenAI, Anthropic doesn't appear to be backing away from its IPO.

Anthropic, the AI giant behind the Claude chatbot, is preparing for an IPO roadshow, according to an announcement from the company. An IPO roadshow is basically a series of sales presentations to potential investors in order to gauge interest and set a final share price. Interestingly, Anthropic is looking to go public at a $1.4 trillion valuation. This is lower than investor expectations, which reportedly reached $2 trillion just two months ago. 

As stated before ...

You start with the flashy tinder and lighter fluid—the hype, the endless venture capital, and the grand promises of artificial general intelligence to get the fire roaring. Then comes the wild, hype phase where the burn barrel draft holes keep feeding oxygen to the beast, burning through billions in compute and off-grid gas generators just to stay alive.

And now? 

Anthropic is definitely in the stoking phase.Trimming a valuation from a hyped-up $2 trillion down to a $1.4 trillion IPO target while the bond market and credit guys start getting twitchy is the exact financial equivalent of poking at the smoking remnants with a long stick, trying to keep the embers glowing before the whole thing collapses into ash. 

They are desperately whistling past the graveyard, hoping the music doesn't stop and someone is still left standing when access to the chairs run out.   

When the fuel source is pure narrative and the burn rate is thermodynamic suicide, even the best burn barrel eventually runs out of oxygen.

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