Will Anthropic’s IPO eclipse SpaceX’s $75 billion public debut?

Will Anthropic’s IPO eclipse SpaceX’s $75 billion public debut? Maybe. Maybe not. Here’s what I find FAR more interesting.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei recently said that saying AI will cure cancer has become a cliché. “The thing that will work is actually curing cancer.”

That sets a pretty high bar for what AI has to ultimately deliver. And I think we’re starting to see what it takes.

Look at biology:

1\ Google Deepmind's AlphaFold helps make biology more legible.

2\ Insilico Medicine uses AI to design drugs, its rentosertib is in Phase III.

3\ Vivodyne's robotic labs can test treatments on human tissue.

The pattern is:

understand → design → intervene → observe → learn.

We’re seeing versions of the same thing in work.

4\ Asana used OpenAI’s Codex to do five years of work in 2 weeks.

5\ Salesforce's Slack code makes agentic coding a multiplayer sport.

6\ Uber's “agentic pods” cut financial reporting from 2 days to 10 mins.

That feels like a bigger shift than “AI writes more code.”

The unit of work starts becoming a loop:

decide → act → see what happened → adapt → act again.

And this is why something Satya Nadella said recently really stuck with me. The human in the loop, on the loop, outside the loop matters MORE not less.

Satya says empathy is not a soft skill.

It’s one of the hardest skills we learn.

His argument is that innovation comes from understanding unmet, unarticulated human needs.

I think that becomes more important as AI gets better.

When agents can increasingly execute, the hard question becomes: What should we execute? What problem actually matters? What does the customer really need? What signal are we missing? What should we try next?

The future of work is about humans becoming better at deciding what is worth doing, while machines make the loop dramatically faster.

That is the part of the next phase of AI I find most interesting.

And maybe that is the real test for AI. Whether we can build systems that actually help us understand, experiment, learn and eventually deliver results in the real world.

Dario’s bar is the right one: Don’t tell us what AI might do.

Show us.

Until next time,

Ram

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Ram Srinivasan

MIT Alum | Author, The Conscious Machine | Global Future of Work and AI Adoption Leader published in Business Insider, Fortune, Harvard Business Review, MIT Executive Viewpoints and more.

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Ram Srinivasan currently serves as an Innovation Strategist and Transformation Leader, authoring groundbreaking works including "The Conscious Machine" and the upcoming "The Substrate Shift."

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