>However, Anthropic’s disclosure to KBRA excluded several important financial metrics, including free cash flow and earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortisation. Credit rating analysts had to come up with their own estimates based on assumptions, the documents show.
>Given the limited information, KBRA produced a “risk score” to assess Anthropic’s creditworthiness rather than the traditional full financial models.
This and the fact they went to a small ratings agency does not inspire confidence in the rating.
No, but a trillion dollar company going to a ratings agency to get an assessment of its credit rating and not giving that ratings agency enough information to do that doesn’t inspire confidence in that trillion dollar company, either.
Why didn’t they give them the info? They either withheld it or don’t have it. Both make them look bad.
If you look at 10-year default rates for BBB-rated paper from the big three plus EJR, AM Best, KBRA and DBRS, you find everyone tightly clustered in the 1 to 2% range except KBRA, who was up at 4% [1]. That suggests they've historically rated junk bonds as barely investment grade. I'm assuming that's what Anthropic was hoping for.
You’re not. That’s why BBB is investment grade. (When you get to A, the default rate falls to 0.1 to 0.5 percent, AA only DBRS with a 1% default rate and AAA with none in that period.)
Go a step down to BB and you’re talking like one in twenty offs of default. (Unless it’s DBRS, in which case it’s one in three.)
Note that default doesn’t mean you lose everything. Conventional recovery estimates are 40%. But the idea of investment grade is you can basically assume that after taking into account interest paid on a portfolio, you should never lose capital.
that's a bigger red flag. there may be reasons (bad) to not give them all the info, but going to a smaller agency is the largest of red flags when you are that big of a company.
KBRA is tasked with producing a rating. Insufficient information won't stop that task. The rating has the confidence it deserves: Anthropic is hiding the bad data and as such no one can rate them highly.
No, the title is poorly phrased, I think you misunderstood.
All ratings agencies have their own scales, but broadly all ratings fall into one of two overarching categories, investment grade vs. junk.
The article explains that the rating ANT received was the highest within the junk range. So “highest junk rating” means within the junk category, it’s in the best sub-area. In other words, it’s just scratching below the investment grade rating.
This is important for institutional investors who can only buy investment grade, meaning if they can improve even one single grade up, they get access to a lot more debt.
> This is important for institutional investors who can only buy investment grade, meaning if they can improve even one single grade up, they get access to a lot more debt.
I believe some institutional investors have policies allowing some purchasing of 'highest junk' as well. Depends on the fund, etc.
I know absolutely nothing about this, but it does strike me it might be self-fulfilling? Companies that have access to more investment tend to win more often, and thus become 'investment grade', while junk-rated firms fail because they don't have the runway?
You can hold both things in your mind and they aren't contradictory. It can be a bad system but it can still be suspicious if someone behaves outside the norm inside it.
Other posts made me understand what it actually measures and why is it meaningful - it tells you if you lend this entity money at the govt bond interest rate, will this entity be able to pay back more or less eventiually?
Obviously a financially rational person wouldn't lend money with worse returns it can get from the government risk-free as that would be charity, hence these are considered 'junk'.
As a user, I feel like talking to them is pointless because nothing we agree to is actually agreed until a human agrees it. The chatbot promising me a refund doesn’t mean I’m going to get a refund. The HR chatbot promising me paid time off doesn’t mean I’m actually going to get paid time off. It’s really still just like the awful old-school chatbots where the whole point was to give you a hard time finding the phone number of the human support team.
I’m not going to install this because I’m not looking for a band, but it would be cool if you could keep in mind solo musicians often need to hire a band in order to play
This could be a good way for people to find that when they don’t have other musicians in their network who can fill that role for them.
seems like something a website could do and not require an app. I hope the dev learned a lot about making an app while building this, as that seems the only purpose for app only to me. Unless they want to get at all of that precious data hoovering money potential. I have become so callused and cynical from malicious devs, that's my first thought on anything that is an app instead of a website
I think the "app" form-factor is preferrable to a "website" for a lot of people. Almost every website I've built over the past 10 years (summing to ~900k-ish users) has had constant streams of users always requesting an app alternative to the website, quote "even if it's just the regular website in an app".
Why not both? Assuming it's running off a DB in the cloud, it should be simple enough for the developer to write a web front-end for it.
I try to keep my phone lean and mean, and I'm not inclined to install an app for something I don't use all the time. Heck, even if I were to use this all the time, I would much rather use it through a web interface.
The answer probably always differs, but for me I'm just one developer without any mobile dev experience and plenty of site features to keep working on -- so taking time away from the main product to work on a complex app equivalent (and implicitly commit to update/maintain it over time with each new feature) didn't make a lot of sense.
People don't like web apps and don't know how to install PWA's (by design of the OS manufacturers that make money from developers needing to pay to be on their hosted platforms). Like it or not, if you tell someone you have a product to use on their phone, they're going to want it to be in the App Store.
Web apps should be able to be listed in the app stores. I understand why people want to find things in the store. Younger generations don't really use the internet the way us old farts did. Discovery is no longer something that SEO and ad driven search makes organic any more, so discovery is nearly impossible. Instead of Yahoo style search of webpages, we have the curated search of apps via stores. Not that the app search is amazing, but it's still a smaller subsection than all of the internet which makes it easier.
I have been using Synthesizer V for a lot of my music and the quality is very high, even with little manual tuning. There are a lot of voices to choose from now, and they added a cross-synthesis feature which lets you use the voices originally intended for Japanese and Chinese in English, and they don’t have a strong accent (I do find that I have to mess with the lyrics input a little). Also SAROS is coming out which has experimental Spanish support.
Definitely recommend looking up some Synthesizer V covers to see how realistic singing voice synthesis has become in recent years. It’s also free to try lower quality versions of the voices.
I would argue that many of the big tech companies have also been subsidised rather than being efficient. It has just been private investors rather than governments (and it feels like we are starting to see the end of that).
It always feels like open source enthusiasts would never pay for something themselves, but expect that their boss will for some reason. What would your boss get by paying that he/she isn't already getting for free?
It would help if the projects had some option to purchase a license or subscription, even if the application is open source. Lots of employees have a company credit card and the authorization to use it for small productivity purchases. But it would have to be a business expense that is easy to file, not a donation.
I think things like being able to contact anyone are important to people, but decentralisation doesn't necessarily provide that (e.g. if I sign up on a Mastodon instance will I be able to see the messages of everyone on every Mastodon instance, and will they be able to see mine? Will I even know if somebody I care about can see my messages or not?)
I think decentralisation is not a selling point to most people. It's an implementation detail that they're happy to go along with but it's a negative if it make the experience worse, makes everything more complicated, if they can't talk to the people they know IRL, etc.
LLMs always remind me of pigeons you see in the city that have spent their whole life eating out of bins and pecking dropped chunks of kebab. We trained it on a bunch of stuff, but we're not sure quite what. Looks like it works OK, so let's get it on a plate!
>However, Anthropic’s disclosure to KBRA excluded several important financial metrics, including free cash flow and earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortisation. Credit rating analysts had to come up with their own estimates based on assumptions, the documents show.
>Given the limited information, KBRA produced a “risk score” to assess Anthropic’s creditworthiness rather than the traditional full financial models.
This and the fact they went to a small ratings agency does not inspire confidence in the rating.