They grow up so fast. Anthropic, a maker of artificial intelligence models and rival to OpenAI, has hired lawyers ahead of an initial public offering that could value it at $350bn next year. By that point the company would have reached the not-at-all-grand age of five.

That makes it a pretty good example of AI companies’ turbocharged growth. As a comparison, Google went public six years after its founding, achieving a valuation of about $23bn. Facebook took eight years to spring into public markets with roughly a $100bn price tag. The geriatric Microsoft waited 11 years and debuted in 1986 at around $800mn.

Behind the hype, at least, is a business. Anthropic’s main product is its chatbot Claude. That generates revenue, if not yet profit: Anthropic has projected that it could make $70bn in sales by 2028, The Information has reported. That would put its mooted valuation at five times that sum. Meta went public in 2012 at, with hindsight, a multiple of six times its three-year-hence sales; China’s Alibaba at seven times and Palantir at 10.