The Best Way to Talk to Your AI Agents

**Nathaniel Whittemore** (0:00)
Today on the AI Daily Brief, what is the best way to be talking to our agents? Are we using Markdown, HTML? Believe it or not, that debate has been raging, and I think it's for a bigger reason than it seems, that has to do with a big shift in how we work. Before that, in the headlines, another potential monster fundraising for Anthropic. The AI Daily Brief is a daily podcast and video about the most important news and discussions in AI.
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We kick off today with more crazy numbers, things that seem normal now that would have been completely abnormal just like five minutes ago. Anthropic is weighing up another round of fundraising at almost a trillion dollar valuation. The Financial Times reports that Anthropic is considering one last round of private funding before their IPO, which is expected in the fall. Anthropic last raised funds in February at a $380 billion valuation. But, of course, their revenue has gone parabolic since then. And just to add a little heft to the market's appetite for this, there is a pre-IPO instrument that's trading on the blockchain on Jupiter, which is backed one-to-one by SPV exposure to Anthropic, basically sort of a crypto equivalent of Anthropic exposure, that about a week ago was trading at a $1.2 trillion implied valuation. So at least some of the speculators out there think that this isn't crazy.
Now, back in the mainstream world, sources told the FT that the round is expected to raise as much as $50 billion for Anthropic and which would value the company at $900 billion pre-money. In the horse race, that would of course put Anthropic ahead of OpenAI, which last raised at $852 billion in March. It also seems like demand is off the charts, with one potential investor commenting, People are ready to throw any dollar amount at Anthropic. It's just about when Anthropic want to pop their heads up and say we're ready.
Another source noted that the SpaceX deal dramatically de-risked the investment, commenting, Anthropic has resolved the biggest bottleneck and potential source of weakness, which is compute. Now, I don't know if I'd go so far as to say that that single deal resolves that, but it is notable that at least some investors are thinking that way.
Now, in terms of whether this comes together, Anthropic executives have reportedly held talks, but terms have not yet been agreed to.
A last-minute fundraising round could be a big curveball for the twin AI IPOs later this year. Anthropic establishing themselves as the top lab in valuation terms at least could help shift analyst views. It would also provide another private market valuation to support an IPO above a trillion dollars, instantly making Anthropic a top 20 public company.
Now, an AI-aligned IPO that is coming up much sooner is Cerebras. Reuters reports that Cerebras is considering boosting their stock price ahead of this week's IPO. The report says that the IPO price could be increased from a range of 115 to 125 per share to between 150 and 160 per share. That increase would boost the implied valuation from the roughly 26 billion previously expected to more than 34 billion. In addition, Cerebras is considering upsizing the share offering from 28 million shares to 30 million shares. All last week, reports claimed that demand was red hot among institutional investors that were participating in the roadshow. As of last Tuesday, demand was said to be roughly three times supply, and Reuters now reports that Cerebras has drawn orders for 20 times the number of available shares.
Trading is currently set to begin on Thursday in what will be the largest IPO so far this year. Commentators are very mixed on this. You can find plenty of folks who are bullish, but then others like Nvidia and tech analyst Tay Kim saying, I wouldn't touch Cerebras with a 100-foot pole. Sure, it may go up on hype sentiment in the short term, but it's far too fundamentally risky because of scaling and future execution.
Omar Chima points out that Polymarket is currently projecting Cerebras to close above 50 billion in market cap by the end of day one.
One interesting note from TSMC, the company reported their slowest rate of sales growth in six months despite the frenetic pace of the AI buildout. The Taiwanese chip maker reported 17.5 percent annualized sales growth for April, which is the slowest pace since last October. While 17.5 percent growth isn't slow per se, it was around half of what analysts had forecast. Now, the question that people immediately raised to is whether this is a leading indicator of an AI bubble bursting. Most though think that it has to either do with one, the fact that the company has experienced a huge slowdown in their non-AI business, and two, just the sheer physical constraints of AI demand starting to eat into what TSMC can do.