While software stocks get hammered over fears that AI startups will eat their lunch, an Anthropic executive says the sell-off shows how fast AI has advanced.
Anthropic's head of applied AI, Cat de Jong, oversees a team focused on helping large companies weave Anthropic's AI into their products. At a press briefing with Thomson Reuters on Monday, she said that people inside Anthropic have seen the market sell-off as rational due to the pace of progress.
"The rate of change is just so incredible, and I think the market is really starting to see this now," she said.
"We're grappling with exponentials, and it's something that humans just aren't really used to having to deal with — how quickly things change. And I think that's actually been why the market has been responding the way that it has been, for us internally."
That said, the sell-off does not account for how Anthropic's work with software companies helps improve their products rather than compete directly with them, de Jong said.
"We want to build the best models in the world," de Jong said. "But I do really think there's a great relationship between general models and domain-specific applications, and our models help them get better."
The sell-off in software stocks began after Anthropic launched new plugins for legal and other knowledge work traditionally dominated by software companies.
Thomson Reuters has been using Anthropic's AI to power some of its latest legal tools. It may have seemed an odd coupling given that Thomson Reuters is one of the highest-profile casualties of the software sell-off, with its stock falling over 30% in the past month, while Anthropic just announced this month it raised $30 billion at a $380 billion valuation — over 10 times Thomson Reuters' market cap.
At the conference, Thomson Reuters executives were bullish about working with Anthropic and touted closely collaborating with the AI startup to build a "deep research" feature inside its legal product, CoCounsel, which generates detailed citation-backed reports.
The two companies will each create sophisticated AI products that excel at different tasks, said Thomson Reuters' chief product officer, David Wong.
The idea that AI is winner-takes-all is misplaced, he said.
"There's so many problems that professionals need help with," Wong said.
