Transcription
All right, Anthropic shipped. Um, I think we talked about this a number of weeks ago when it first happened: a new Claude Co-work plugin. Well, Claude Co-work was what shipped. And then there's a new plugin that actually automates more routine legal work. So, you know, things like compliance tracking or document review, that sort of stuff, as part of this plug-in. And it turns out that was enough to shock public markets. Investors were suddenly fleeing anything tied to traditional legal workflows in software and that sort of stuff in a single day. There were some pretty steep declines, hit companies like Legal Zoom, Thompson Reuters, Relics, Walters Clu. A couple of these I'm not super familiar with. Definitely familiar with Legal Zoom. Those companies, they rely on selling research, selling data, collecting data, guided legal services, that sort of stuff. But now Claude Co-work can do some of that. And so the markets responded and said, "Oh, should we be concerned?" That led to a broader selloff of software, data, advertising, financial services stocks, many of them impacted, I guess, because investors were saying, "Well, if Claude can do that, then is all software, you know, in the, in the, in the target?" So yeah, what do you, what do you think about this as of today? I don't think those stocks have necessarily snapped back. They haven't rebounded. The NASDAQ is down 2% as we speak today.
>> So, it was a, so it was a big reaction.
>> It's a rout. It's a rout.
>> Yeah. I'm a little confused by this. On the one hand, um, couldn't happen to nicer people. Um, uh, legal stuff and consultants, uh, don't have quite the same sympathy that other job titles are going to have. Though, let me be clear: people depend upon their lives on their jobs. And I don't say this with Hank Lee, but as an industry, uh, you think they would have been better prepared. This is like, comes as a shock that this kind of analysis can be made. They can be replacing it, and, and Claude did that. Um, so I understand why the companies that are affected would go down. What confuses me about this rout is why are the software companies going down? Why are the companies that are making these savings? Is this finally the first evidence that AI brings productivity to industries that every law firm in the country can now pay less for legal services, information services, because of Claude? Uh, that would seem to make the value of the AI companies soar up, but no, they're down.
>> But no, they're down as well. Oh, okay. That's interesting. Yeah.
The other piece of this, I think, is that, is that, uh, you go back to, I'm not sure who said it. Is it, is it, is it, um, Reed Hoffman or Mark Andre? I think it was Reed who said, "Software eats the world." Um, and so in a way, this became, uh, a two-day, uh, dose of cooties for software, like, "Oh, software's in trouble because software is going to be replaced by all this stuff." They, they went the next step. Um, but no, it's the software that saves you what you're spending from these services. So the software should become more valuable, uh, as we finally get to the point of demonstrable economic impact.
It's interesting that, um, and I'm, I'm not a financial guy, you know, I don't, I don't follow the markets. I don't trade stocks or anything like that, but it's just, it's, it's interesting to me how there are, and this is just how it works, so somebody's going to hear me say this and be like, "Well, duh. That's just how it works." But how there are moments like this that clearly everybody caught the same memo at the same time, or at least enough of them caught the same memo at the same time that the other ones started looking around going, "Oh, well, maybe we should catch that memo, too." Okay. And then, and then they react. And so when I see something like this, I'm like, are they all reacting to the same thing, or are some of them just reacting because the others are reacting, because there's an opportunity in the moment to react?
>> Yeah. Yeah. I, that's one of the grand, showing the grand BS of financial reporting is that, is at the end of every day, they say, "This is why the market did what the market did." There is no singular market. There is absolutely no way to know what motive or rationale is.
>> That's exactly it. It's imputed. Yeah.
>> Um, it's inferred. Uh, yeah. Translated. And so, who knows? I, I, I could be wrong. Uh, I don't think this will be a long-lasting rout.
>> I don't think so either.
>> Um,
>> Could be wrong.
>> Uh, because I think there's opportunities here. Uh, but we'll see.
>> Yeah. And I mean, there are other examples of this happening. I, I was like, kind of looking into this, like, have we seen this before? CHEG and Coursera dropped 10%.
>> Right.
Last April when they had their earnings call, um, which at the time was seen as a reaction to students using ChatGPT. And so, you know, does this just signal that we're going to see more of this as these systems get more capable?
>> Yeah. I [music] mean, the other angle of the story that I think is really interesting here is Anthropic is staying ahead of the pack. Google's ahead in its own way, but OpenAI is falling down and down and down and down. Perplexity, which I used to stand here and say, "Oh, Perplexity is doing all these cool things," it's not doing anything of real great value. Anthropic is interesting. Yeah. And so, Anthropic is really making waves in, in, in useful and interesting ways.