As Software Stocks Slump, Investors Debate AI's Existential Threat (reuters.com)
- Reference: 0180731150
- News link: https://slashdot.org/story/26/02/04/1810206/as-software-stocks-slump-investors-debate-ais-existential-threat
- Source link: https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/global-software-stocks-hit-by-anthropic-wake-up-call-ai-disruption-2026-02-04/
> After a broad selloff on Tuesday that saw the S&P 500 software and services index fall nearly 4%, the sector slipped another 1% on Wednesday. While software stocks have been under pressure in recent months as AI has gone from being a tailwind for many of these companies to investors worrying about the disruption it will cause to some sectors, the latest selloff was triggered by a new legal tool from Anthropic's Claude large language model (LLM).
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> The tool - a plug-in for Claude's agent for tasks across legal, sales, marketing and data analysis - underscored the push by LLMs into the so-called "application layer," where these firms are increasingly muscling into lucrative enterprise businesses for revenue they need to fund massive investments. If successful, investors worry, it could wreak havoc across a range of industries, from finance to law and coding.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/global-software-stocks-hit-by-anthropic-wake-up-call-ai-disruption-2026-02-04/
Now is the time (Score:3)
If you're in it for the long term, now's the time to buy software stocks, I guess.
well... (Score:3)
...as long as they aren't one of the companies that bet the farm on AI...
Those companies will never recover. On the plus side, Windows 12 can't be any worse than Windows 11 if Microsoft died before Windows 12 was released.
Re: (Score:2)
Yes, I meant traditional software companies that produce software and not vibe-coded vulnerability-ware.
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"risks including competition from AI-native firms and clients building their own solutions in-house"
Apparently investors think the software companies could be overtaken permanently.
It's as useless as the average human (Score:3, Interesting)
I've been frustrated by AI constantly making shit up and stating things as fact when it's clearly wrong. But then I realized if you read around the internet that it's full of posts that are just factually untrue. Like I'm not talking about opinion stuff... I mean people posting absolutely untrue "facts" even on technical forums where a very cursory google search with turn up multiple independent sources that show they're completely wrong.
So, it turns out that if you can make a program that's only correct 90% of the time, you've already created a program that's correct more often than the average employee, so it's probably useful. This is completely backwards to how I think about computers, but I can't deny it. Humans are just a lot less useful than I thought, particularly if you need them to make correct decisions.
Re:It's as useless as the average human (Score:5, Informative)
The problem is, most people have learned to have a bit of healthy skepticism about what humans say and produce, whereas a lot more people accept anything an AI program says without any questioning.
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> The problem is, most people have learned to have a bit of healthy skepticism about what humans say and produce, whereas a lot more people accept anything an AI program says without any questioning.
The computer clergy have been promoting the idea of computer perfectionism since long before AI started being batted around by the corporate types like a kitten plays with a ball of yarn. And once AI started to get bandied about in public, the computer clergy added a new branch to their kind, the AI prophets, determined to promote the idea of computer god among the masses. And way too many people that should know better are falling for it.
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If I search for what type of oil to use in my car, there will be pages and pages of forum posts of people bickering about who's wrong answer is the best. ChatGPT gets it right the first time, and that's amazing considering it's trained on so many wrong answers. And I'd say its WAY more than 90% accurate.
Re:It's as useless as the average human (Score:4, Interesting)
"So, it turns out that if you can make a program that's only correct 90% of the time, you've already created a program that's correct more often than the average employee, so it's probably useful."
It depends on what you're doing with it. If you're looking for facts and look around the internet yourself, you usually get a pretty good idea of how trustworthy the source is. But an AI makes truth and the worst nonsense look and sound equally authoritative, and that's how most people take its answers.br But if you're using it as a helpdesk, it's probably fine. It's a good application of AI, as it can do both 1st and 2nd line support, and if it is able to help people 90% of the time, that's not too shabby.
Re: (Score:2)
Having just spent a few days butting heads with an outsourced customer service call center, I can't disagree. These people repeatedly hallucinate facts, deny facts already in evidence, and contradict each other. When I point this out (it's all in writing) they simply ignore what I say and repeat the behavior.
If you replaced all those people with AI, there would be problems, but maybe not worse or even fundamentally different problems.
AI will strengthen FOSS and weaken SaaS. (Score:2)
SaaS has always been a shady business model. Now AI has experts as the only people left doing anything with building new Software, at a massively hiked productivity that still is rising almost by the week. And since AI does not care if it's working on FOSS or proprietary Software - it's actually more likely to deliver for FOSS, since FOSS documentation isn't hidden behind a paywall and can easily be processed by LLMs - experts will be using AI to work on FOSS, because they've long since come to love the adv
Re:AI will strengthen FOSS and weaken SaaS. (Score:4, Interesting)
On the one hand, most SaaS solutions are just webified implementations of crap that would be better suited to dBase III on DOS. On the flip side, AI as it's being sold is SaaS in all its worst forms, except now its results aren't repetable.
The index is only the sum of its parts (Score:2)
This index of companies is down, yes. But each company on that index is down (or up) for different reasons.
Oracle, for example, is down in part because of the huge exposure it has to an AI bubble.
Salesforce, likewise, has invested huge amounts of money and marketing on its AI gamble, which might well not play out as they hope.
Fair Isaac, which doesn't have an obvious reason to be in a software index, and which isn't apparently highly exposed to risk from AI, is just down to where it was in September of las
At this point every stock slump is a good thing (Score:3)
Recessions happen with the regularity of a heartbeat, and we're right in the spot on the curve where a downwards slope is expected. Stocks are stupidly overvalued at the moment. It's time for a recession aka a-badly-needed-splash-of-cold-water-in-the-face. If we engage in all sorts of shenanigans to put it off, it'll just build up trouble and make the eventual recession worse.
2 hours of partying is fun and a slight hangover. 12 hours of partying means 3 days of recovery and permanent liver scarring. The current stockmarket party is well past the 2 hour mark and getting into the stupid zone. Time for a small recession.
Re: (Score:2)
A recession is a consequence of money having too many places to go, of being spread thinly: With the USA turning into a stocks and bonds wild west, there's plenty of places to park money. So, yes a recession should be happening. But the wild west is creating a chain reaction, similar to a pricing bubble (where money is too concentrated). It's more like a snake eating its own tail, because the fixation is on the GDP (and thus the price), not the long-term goods being exported (software, music, movies, bo
Investors are kinda crazy (Score:5, Insightful)
They are a bit like fortune tellers, trying to not only predict an increasingly unpredictable future, but trying to predict what other investors will do
It's like a casino for the insane
This is what we asked for... (Score:3)
As a society, we cannot create disruptive technologies and not expect disruption.
Industrial Estate (Score:2)
When I look around my industrial estate, full of fabricators, tool suppliers, hydraulics, hardware, car repair, pipe extrusion, specialist bakeries and printers, you know, where real life happens outside the tech bubble, I can assure you AI will have zero impact for the foreseeable future. The main use I see so far, is a better search engine.
Good grief. (Score:2)
Sure, it might fuck up the biosphere and ultimately kill humanity, that's cool. But look, now we're talking real problems. It might cause a minor disruption for Wall Street! SOMETHING MUST BE DONE!
Stupid investors are the problem, not AI (Score:2)
No, Nvidia will not die if OpenAI considers if there are also other graphic card companies. No, a proof of concept world model will not create games on its own. Sometimes one thinks people investing at the stock market don't have *any* idea about what the companies actually do when buying the shares.
If you read Anthropics product description... (Score:2)
... you will always find the cover-your-ass sentence "Results need to be checked by a trained professional". And of course everybody knows this is exactly what will not happen, as it would contradict the purpose of those bots to replace costs for trained professionals. So the inevitable result of using those "expert" plug-ins will be a lower quality of the results, at an (at least at first) lower price. And maybe even some Investors realize what a bleak future this foretells.
The real problem (Score:2)
The middle-men are complaining, the first wave of AI is unpredictable and they will lose money. They will move their money out of the obvious threats, OpenAI, Anthopic, etc.
Here, they are pondering, if writing can be automated by a machine, as promised. If everyone can produce their own software, the demand for commercial software will disappear. They are trying to put a price on that. Then, they need a new place to park their money. But which businesses won't lose employees and profits from the spre
What's the problem (Score:5, Insightful)
I think they are complaining that AI might be highly effective, but I think the risk is that AI proves to be broadly ineffective and it's been a waste of so much resource.
If AI is effective and truly disruptive then it will take time, but humanity will adapt and we'll be better off for it
If it proves to be as disruptive as blockchain then we wasted a lot of carbon
Re: (Score:3)
[1]The first story says different. I think its more about the bubble pop soon to occur. [youtube.com]
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TRenM9ORamE
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A YouTube link reveals nothing about the content. Nor can I recall your handle as associated with good or bad information. Care to say a bit more about who made the video or about why you believe it?
I would appeal to books, but that seems so passe for Slashdot these years. (Can Slashdot even handle passé with the accent?) However, as supported by some recent reading, I think stock prices are imaginary and might only makes short-term "victory", with "right" and "wrong" belonging to a completely orthogon
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> If it proves to be as disruptive as blockchain then we wasted a lot of carbon
Disruptive? The average human, still uses their fiat currency. To 100% effectiveness. The average human, has no fucking idea what blockchain even is, much less what it could potentially deliver.
Yes. It's true. Ask 100 people about "blockchain" to confirm yourself. Tell me how many vendors that currently sustain your existence even accept shitcoin as payment. Tends to say a lot about "mass" adoption.
We wasted a lot of carbon doing the shit-effort required to justify "value" in the shitcoin world, whic
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If you read his full comment and appreciate the context in which it was written, then he's claiming that if AI has the same impact as blockchain then all this was for nothing; by extension he's saying blockchain did nothing of value either.