Katarzyna Petru
As Benj Edwards from arstechnica notes, companies dealing with artificial intelligence are increasingly shifting the direction of their product development. Instead of one conversation bot, the user now has to manage a team of AI agents that share 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 analyzing independently, the user supervises the work of AI, corrects mistakes, and decides what to do next. Although it sounds futuristic, current agents still require constant supervision and are not yet fully autonomous “workers.” Nevertheless, the industry is heavily investing in this model, seeing it as the future of working with AI. Will managing bots actually prove to be more effective than traditional human work?
Claude gains a new, more powerful model
Anthropic has presented Opus 4.6, a major update to its flagship AI model and the successor to version 4.5. For the first time in the Opus series, the model supports context 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 OpenAI's latest 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 working with very long materials better — which is crucial when using teams of AI agents. API prices remain unchanged from the previous version, and the model is already available in the Claude service, via API, and on major cloud platforms.
Market Turmoil
The launch of new AI-based tools coincided with an exceptionally nervous period in the financial markets. After Anthropic expanded its agent solutions with additional 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 days, hundreds of billions of dollars vanished from the valuations of companies in the software and financial services sectors. The largest declines hit companies whose business models may be particularly susceptible to AI-driven automation, and the wave of sell-offs spread beyond the American market. An additional source of concern became the announcements from OpenAI, which is developing a platform allowing AI agents to perform tasks independently within corporate systems. Although producers emphasize that this is not about replacing existing software, the market clearly senses a change in direction.
source: arstechnica
