Despite being one of the world leaders in AI development, the private firm Anthropic has yet to post a quarterly profit. That operating deficit isn’t for a lack of trying — and, as the company tells it, could be reversing very soon, at least if you’re willing to swallow one massive caveat.

According to new reporting by the Financial Times, the company behind the Claude told a select group of trusted investors that its adjusted operating income (AOI) is set to be positive for the second consecutive quarter.

AOI is an accounting technique that strips out non-recurring costs, giving backers a very specific look under a company’s hood. Posting a profit on AOI is very different from posting a profit on net income, otherwise known as the “bottom line,” under which Anthropic remains billions of dollars in the red.

Aside from the fact that Anthropic is not about to turn a real profit anytime soon, it may still be a noteworthy signal. The AI world is currently awash in fear-mongering over AI safety, a phenomena some analysts say could signal a turn away from the race-to-the-bottom to build artificial general intelligence toward a more reasonable — if less ambitious — embrace of AI as it currently is.

While it remains to be seen how these narratives and business realities play out in practice, if the top American AI companies choose to stop and let the dust settle, Anthropic may very well find itself ahead of its competition. Though Anthropic is still far underwater, companies like ChatGPT developer OpenAI are somehow even deeper.

As lead AI analyst at the firm SemiAnalysis Joey Brookhart told the FT, “if you continue to operate at these margins and growth rates, it will be so hard to compete [with Anthropic] because they have so much [in the way of computing resources].”

Still, there are some questions in the AI lab’s story that have yet to be answered. For one thing, this profitability forecast — a flattering projection conveniently leaked to the financial press at a pivotal moment — comes in place of a highly anticipated public prospectus which the company was expected to make public sometime last week. Anthropic may still be planning to release the prospectus soon, but it’s worth noting the company has chosen to lead with spectacle and innuendo, as opposed to the formal legal document.

For months, Anthropic has been teasing a public stock offering that hasn’t yet materialized, and it remains to be seen whether the latest slowdown talk will impact that timeline. In fact, there’s reason to believe this song and dance is all part of the lead-up to the AI lab’s IPO, as investors whip themselves into a frenzy about AI safety.

As Anthropic investor Brad Gerstner said in a post on X-formerly-Twitter over the weekend, “Anthropic will IPO” anyway, because there is “huge appetite to invest in the AI leaders,” especially those which are seen as bringing “even more transparency, scrutiny, accountability” into the AI space (at least as far as Gerstner’s investments are concerned.)

More on Anthropic: New Anthropic Ad Implies AI Could Kill Us All

The post Anthropic Boasts It Would Be Profitable if You Ignore How Much It Costs to Develop AI appeared first on Futurism.

At this point, if you’re not using personal access to political power to run billion-dollar crypto scams, you’re seriously missing out.

Previously, it was the Trump dynasty cashing in, using the family name to rake in over $1 billion off the backs of gullible crypto bros. Now, it’s former president Joe Biden’s son Hunter, whose memecoin $LAPTOP is following the tell-tale signs of a cyrpto rug pull.

If you’re not familiar with this side of the cryptoverse, here’s a quick breakdown. A memecoin is basically an extremely volatile financial vehicle designed to cash in on trending memes or other viral phenomena. Unlike other cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, memecoins lack even the thinnest pretense of real world utility. Instead, they live or die on hype alone, with the vast majority of memecoins collapsing like a house of cards as soon as a few early investors begin selling off their holdings.

This, of course, is exactly what happened with $LAPTOP. According to DeCrypt, the young Biden’s memecoin launched at 8 am on Wednesday morning, peaking at a price of $190.81 dollars just two minutes after opening to traders. Before 9 am rolled around, the value of the memecoin had plummeted to just $3.70, collapsing from a fully diluted value of $144 billion to $4.8 billion in a matter of minutes.

As the Washington Post observed, roughly 80 percent of people who bought the crypto token ended up losing money.

Biden, for his part, touted $LAPTOP as a way to reclaim his honor in the wake of the convoluted laptop controversy of 2020, where it was alleged that the younger Biden was appropriating his father’s political position in business dealings in Ukraine and China.

“The symbol they used to try to end me is now a symbol of resilience, redemption, and recovery,” Biden posted on X-formerly-Twitter before the memecoin went public. “They turned laptop into a weapon. I turned it into a token.”

It’s unclear exactly how much he made from the rugpull, or where exactly any of that money went. In his post, Biden alluded to a “mechanism” by which “20 percent of the coins will be airdropped to the community,” without elaborating on what that means.

A further portion of the tokens could be sent to a charity in a spiteful dig at Trump, as Biden cryptically explained.

“Thirty percent of the tokens are tied to a pre-programmed mechanism,” he tweeted. “We publicly say what has to happen in the world. If it happens, the corresponding tokens are permanently burned. If it does not, those tokens are sent to charity. Either way, they leave our hands and an additional 50 million tokens will go to charity no matter what.”

“With $TRUMP, nearly one million wallets have collectively lost ~$3.8 [billion],” Biden continued. “With my token, 20 percent of the coins will be airdropped to the community, and I am even including people that lost money on the $TRUMP grift.”

A follow-up post published on the blogging platform Medium clarifies that this “mechanism” is a kind of prediction-market line, where “30 percent of supply is tied to public, verifiable events criteria.”

“When a prediction resolves YES, the tokens are burned. When it doesn’t, they go to charity,” Biden explained. Basically, there are dozens of these “events” baked into $LAPTOP that determine what happens to the tokens as time goes on. Some of them are relatively straightforward, like “will President Trump be impeached during his term?” while others only add to the labyrinthine scheme.

“The first event, 5,000,000 tokens, was resolved yesterday when Beeple referenced $LAPTOP,” Biden wrote on his blog.

Of course, the memecoin’s valuation matters a great deal: whether the five millions tokens are priced at a few cents or a few hundred dollars when the prediction resolves has drastic implications for the final payout. Now that the price of LAPTOP is in the gutter, the not-at-all-ironclad law of memecoins says that it’s extremely unlikely to shoot back up without a major cash injection.

In all, it’s an extremely sketchy — not to mention gimmicky — setup for a guy who’s already worth $17 million.

Maybe it’d be one thing if all of the proceeds were guaranteed to end up with a charity, but that whole mechanism looks to be a distant afterthought. Instead, Biden is focused on the more nebulous task of “help[ing] each other and our country to get back up” — though how a hundred-billion-dollar crypto scam is supposed to accomplish that remains to be seen.

More on crypto scams: Trump Fans Confused by How Their Investments in His Crypto and Stock Are Now Worth a Tiny Fraction While He’s Getting Richer

The post Hunter Biden’s $LAPTOP Meme Coin Is Either a National Disgrace or the Funniest Thing He’s Ever Done, and We’re Not Entirely Sure Which appeared first on Futurism.