In addition to Open AI, Anthropic is now one of the most important American start-ups for artificial intelligence. And Dario Amodei, the company’s co-founder and CEO, is known for very worrying warnings about the disruptive potential of AI technologies.
He has said AI could raise the unemployment rate to 10 to 20 percent within five years and eliminate half of all office jobs for entry-level workers. The AI threat is particularly great for lawyers, bankers and management consultants.
Anthropic is working hard on this disruption – and has now even stirred up panic in the financial markets with a new variant of its AI system Claude. It is an assistant program that helps automate various office tasks and can perform tasks that would otherwise be used with classic business software.
Another wake-up call
Anthropic has also introduced special additional modules for this program that are aimed at specific areas of work, for example legal tasks such as reviewing contracts. All of this increased concerns that AI could now automate one professional field after another and thus replace other software. The shares of many software companies lost value.
The market reaction may be exaggerated. AI will not make traditional software providers obsolete on a broad front overnight. Some companies are more isolated than others, especially when they handle sensitive data or operate in highly regulated areas.
But if AI now makes it possible for even people with little computer knowledge to quickly develop their own software, it will undoubtedly call into question the future prospects of the industry and threaten the high profit margins that have long enjoyed it.
The tremor on the financial markets is now another wake-up call. An industry that likes to see itself as a disruptive force is now in danger of becoming a victim of disruption itself.
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