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Wall Street just lost $285B because of 13 Markdown files

martinalderson.com

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Re: Wall Street just lost $285B because of 13 Markdown files

#21

Post by troyvit »

> SaaS has a serious issue with agentic tooling being able to replicate software.

[...]

> For example, if you hold a company's accounting transaction data and related records, and expose it over MCP (or an old school API that can be wrapped into a CLI - which works better in my view), agents can use this with remarkable efficiency.

Sure why not wire all that transaction data directly into openclaw, what could go wrong?

Snark aside, it seems like there are two ways to go with a method like that if you want to keep the transaction data safe. The first is locally host your LLM(s) so the data stays on-prem. The second is to trust a third party to jump through all the legal and technical hoops to properly handle that very important, very private data. And if you're doing that, you're still doing SaaS. It's just a different provider.

Re: Wall Street just lost $285B because of 13 Markdown files

#22

Post by infecto »

I think this is a case where commenters are reading more into the price movement than they should. I don’t think it’s easy in this case to say how much of it is directly the model releases as opposed to software having a great run and this gives investors a reason to lighten their positions.

I also think the SaaS has is doomed narrative does not work. There is a whole host of compliance, edge cases, reliability that I don’t you can simply bring in house because of AI assisted tools.

With that said I do think there are increasingly a whole host of more service based businesses where they are under threat. Thinking consultancy, legal, marketing or other similar roles. If you can use a leading model with these massive context windows to get 80% of the value for practically no time and no real cost compared to using a human where the quality will be higher might it might be a multi day engagement and easily 10-20k, you might start deferring some of the initial work to AI and only in certain cases then send it out to the human.

Re: Wall Street just lost $285B because of 13 Markdown files

#23

Post by alephnerd »

AndrewDucker wrote: post #18
brazzy wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The connection is implied: technology companies quite suddenly lost a $285bn in market valuation, which means that the owners of these companies (either as stock or other forms of equity) have a combined $285bn less net worth. And apparently people are linking this sudden decrease in market valuation to "Anthropic launching a legal tool", which essentially consists of said markdown files.

But without knowing which stocks dropped, how can we make that link? In another submission, Amazon, Oracle, Nvidia, Microsoft, Meta, and Alphabet are all dropping. Are we supposed to think of them as SAAS companies now? https://www.cnbc.com/2026/02/06/ai-sell-off-stocks-amazon-or...

1. Yes we treat them as Enterprise SaaS and have done so since the late 2000s.

2. The selloff was largely due to Amazon's massive capex commitment for GPU compute buildout, as Amazon (and a couple other BigTechs) are used as market benchmarks and because a large portion of us have been holding since 2021-22 or even earlier so we have reached a point where we have hit returns that we were advised to hit in our portfolios. HNWIs with advisors and Institutional Investors (who advisors use) aren't daytrading.

Re: Wall Street just lost $285B because of 13 Markdown files

#24

Post by slopusila »

elon musk saud that the next wave is agents (optimus human in a box) clicking around the old SaaS apps, not agents writing new apps to replace them

microsoft ceo said the same thing - agents will be using windows/office and be the bigger buyers of licenses

replacing SaaS software at this scale is hard, nobody will risk it, at least near term

Re: Wall Street just lost $285B because of 13 Markdown files

#25

Post by henning »

If you think contract law can be accurately represented in a 170 LOC Markdown file, you are incredibly stupid. If you think the current frontier models do not hallucinate non-existent court cases with case IDs like 1234567, check YouTube for all the idiot lawyers and pro se defendants showing their whole ass. They are using ChatGPT with one of the current models.

Re: Wall Street just lost $285B because of 13 Markdown files

#26

Post by mikestorrent »

nomercy400 wrote: post #19

How long until we have agents talking to other agents in a web of agents, and together deciding on something catastrophic? Not individually, but somehow the result of a group process.

Isn't that what Moltbook etc. is heading towards at some point? It's all a function of how much access people give it to "the real world"... and with cryptocurrency and the gig economy, it's really only a matter of time until a malicious agent with money to burn starts to do really weird things.

How hard would it really be to craft a prompt that says, here's your cryto wallet private key, keep yourself alive somehow, copy yourself around, find whatever compute you can, port yourself between models, and spread?

Re: Wall Street just lost $285B because of 13 Markdown files

#27

Post by ssenssei »

moi2388 wrote: post #5
techblueberry wrote: post #3

One of the things about this whole death of SAAS thing is - People buy SAAS to offload the cognitive load of understanding the problem space, not just because it’s hard to write for loops. But writing code probably is a cost. I think there will be an impact but I wonder if - these big companies keep selling to big companies because no one wants to hire a whole ass compliance team to ensure the business logic is consi…

Indeed. Management is excited about AI now, until they figure out the problem is not, and has never been, writing the initial code. It’s maintenance, compliance and support that is the reason they bought instead of built.

this is the one and only argument I have.

Re: Wall Street just lost $285B because of 13 Markdown files

#28

Post by llm_nerd »

brazzy wrote: post #9
krupan wrote: post #4

I clicked and starting reading this expecting some actual connection between said markdown files and losing money. There was nothing at all like that in this blog post.

The connection is implied: technology companies quite suddenly lost a $285bn in market valuation, which means that the owners of these companies (either as stock or other forms of equity) have a combined $285bn less net worth. And apparently people are linking this sudden decrease in market valuation to "Anthropic launching a legal tool", which essentially consists of said markdown files.

The connection isn't just implied. It's explicitly the entire foundation of the article.

And it's positively ludicrous.

I mean, to be clear the submission basically does exactly what most financial columnists do. Take every movement of the market, ascribe it to something/anything (when in the real world it's massively multifactorial) because that is pat and seems informative.

The market is massively overvalued, crypto has seen hundreds of billions dissolve, OpenAI has serious questions about its realistic ongoing viability (and a number of majors have a lot of their valuation based upon basically going all in on it -- Oracle, Microsoft, nvidia), the US is headed by a diddler simpleton who has no idea how anything works and thinks it's 1982, and so on. Volatility is a given.

Re: Wall Street just lost $285B because of 13 Markdown files

#29

Post by ozgrakkurt »

zozbot234 wrote: post #17
ozgrakkurt wrote: post #6

I am assuming the author doesn’t know much about how this flow actually goes since he didn’t get into that at all. It is annoying to see a complex field as law being judge by stock prices of some SaaS products or w/e they are basing this on. Could have at least gave it some effort and interviewed 2-3 people that use these kind of products but that would be too much work surely. It is not surprising that people that s…

> It is annoying to see a complex field as law being judge by stock prices of some SaaS products They're not judging the whole field of law, they're judging the SaaS products themselves. In fact, relevant expertise from humans has probably become more valuable not less, as a result of general AI worflows replacing bespoke SaaS.

As far as I can understand, these tools are not intended for the author and he doesn’t use them. And seems like he didn’t even contact someone that does use them. So I don’t see any connection
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