At those numbers it's all a silly game. How much of that was paid to shareholders rather than the business so they can cash out? How much of that is vendors buying future revenue? What liquidation preference is that at?
From what has been reported it's clearly not as simple as raising 122 billion. Some folks called it "scraping the barrel", supposedly Anthropic has surpassed them on the secondary market, etc.
When you reposition the core strategic posture of how you make money on very compressed time scales it’s because there is a massive cash crunch. They killed sora, the type of deal with Disney that should have been an 100 year strategic win, but wasn’t viable economically and they don’t have the assets to weather that storm.
Same with a few other steps we are seeing them take.
It all looks fine until it doesn’t. Once the cash crunch hits. It’s too late
I am all for monopoly breakdown. But there is an argument that this is anticompetitive strategy designed to undercut the commercial viability of the other labs. In free trade negotiations this is called “dumping”: selling a product below cost at a high volume to gain market share by driving competition out of the market and then raising prices when you’ve outlasted them.
I've been using Kilo Code (VS Code Plugin) for the last few days, and it does most of what I liked in Cursor without tying me to their particular subscription.
That said, people are increasingly migrating to CLI tools (Claude Code if you like the Claude models, Pi Agent if you want something that's highly customizable, Crush if you want something fun), or GUI tools that are less code-first (Codex GUI).
It has a CLI component and a very flashy TUI application. The TUI has lots of effort put in to layouts, color, and really pushing the boundaries of what a TUI can be. It looks a bit “hacker in a 2000s movie” except with pink instead of green as the dominant color.
Totally not for everybody though. I can see why some people would hate it.
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