Katarzyna Petru
As Benj Edwards from arstechnica notes, companies focused on artificial intelligence are increasingly shifting the direction of their product development. Instead of a single conversation bot, users now manage a team of AI agents that divide tasks and work in parallel. This approach is being promoted by among others. Anthropic and OpenAI in their latest tools. In practice, this means that the role of the human is changing; instead of writing and analysing independently, the user supervises the work of the AI, corrects mistakes, and decides what happens next. While it sounds futuristic, current agents still require constant oversight and are not yet fully autonomous 'workers'. Despite this, the industry is strongly betting on this model, seeing it as the future of working with AI. Will managing bots actually prove to be more effective than traditional human labour?
Claude gains a new, more powerful model
Anthropic has unveiled Opus 4.6, a major update to its flagship AI model and successor to version 4.5. For the first time in the Opus series, the model supports context of up to 1 million tokens (in beta), allowing for the analysis of very long texts and complex code snippets in a single session. According to the company, the new version performs better than earlier competing models in programming, reasoning, and information retrieval tests, although the latest OpenAI model regained an edge in one of the benchmarks. Opus 4.6 has also significantly improved its ability to solve problems that are simple for humans but difficult for AI, and it handles very long materials better — which is crucial when using teams of AI agents. API pricing remains unchanged from the previous version, and the model is already available in the Claude service, through the API and on major cloud platforms.
Market Turmoil
The launch of new AI-based tools coincided with an exceptionally volatile period in the financial markets. After Anthropic enhanced its agent-based solutions with further professional features, investors began to worry that AI companies would be able to take over tasks previously performed by traditional SaaS services. The stock market's reaction was swift and severe — within a few days, hundreds of billions of dollars vanished from the valuations of companies in the software and financial services sectors. The largest declines affected companies whose business models may be particularly susceptible to AI-based automation, and the wave of sell-offs spilled beyond the American market. Additional cause for concern came from announcements by OpenAI, which is developing a platform allowing AI agents to autonomously perform tasks in corporate systems. Although manufacturers emphasize that it's not about replacing existing software, the market clearly perceives a shift in direction.
source: arstechnica
