How Wrong Was Dario Amodei's 2021 Plan for Anthropic?

Kevin Roose says Dario Amodei's 2021 note, Vision for a New Co, written as Anthropic was starting, put a full AGI at about 10 billion dollars. Roose thinks that was off by at least one order of magnitude, and probably by multiples. The same document said Anthropic would never need more than about 50 people. He says the company now has about 5,000 people, off by about 100 times. The work has taken longer and cost quite a bit more than they thought.

Enterprise software is how the labs keep going, in his telling. It pays for the GPUs and the researchers. It is the table stakes of staying on the frontier, not the founders' real passion. Sam Altman told him, for the book, that running a giant tech company was an accident and had never been the plan. Roose also says no one has gone from zero dollars in revenue to a potential two trillion dollar IPO in five years. They are scrambling to build the plane as it heads toward the event horizon. That is his read of their forecasts, not a verdict that the companies are failing.