TL;DR 📌 According to an article in Quartz, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei warns that AI may eliminate up to half of all entry-level white-collar jobs within five years, pushing U.S. unemployment to 10–20%. He urges industry and government to stop downplaying the threat, especially in fields like finance, law, tech, and consulting. Why It Matters 📊 - Seismic Labor Disruption: Roles in loan processing, compliance, and back-office functions are vulnerable to AI replacement — directly impacting mortgage ops. - Policy & Leadership Vacuum: Tech insiders see what’s coming, but political and corporate leaders remain unprepared or silent. - Investor Movement: Major backers like Amazon and Google are investing billions into Anthropic, showing where money sees the future. - Tool Capability: Claude 3.5 can already interact with computer interfaces — a game-changer for digital workflows, including CRM and LOS systems. Put in Context... 🔍 This warning comes amid the launch of Claude Opus 4 and Sonnet 4, designed for advanced reasoning and coding. It's also hot on the heels of broader AI tool adoption in mortgage platforms — like Brimma’s Vallia suite, which already tackles document flow, data integration, and loan estimate disclosure automation. Think About It 🧠 Are your junior roles ready to evolve — or are they next on AI’s chopping block? What’s your transition plan if/when AI becomes a front-line teammate instead of a backend tool?

Per the article below from CNBC, some say the Fed rate could be lowered by a full one point later this year. If that happens, what WILL lenders do? Mortgage rates tumble on tariffs, but housing costs still near record high

Want to skip all of the services that suggest they can tell you whether a borrower should float or lock? Some lenders are paying thousands of dollars a month for a service like this. There's a prompt for that 😄. Sample Prompt I am taking out a 30-year fixed mortgage loan of $600,000 on a new house purchase. Currently, my loan rate is floating. If I intend to close on this mortgage on May 5, 2025, what is the consensus among all known reliable analysts as to chances of rates going down in the next 30 days? Please provide the summary of analysts' perspectives only without a detailed explanation about the challenges of predicting rate movements. Key points: - We used ChatGPT's Deep Research option to ensure this did a thorough assessment. It cited 23 sources including Fannie, Freddie, and Wells Fargo - The results from this prompt on April 2, 2025 were as follows: Analysts and economists broadly agree that 30-year fixed mortgage rates are unlikely to drop significantly over the next 30 days. Most projections from late March and early April 2025 indicate that rates will hover around their current mid-6% level, with only a modest chance of a slight decrease by early May. In other words, the prevailing expectation is for relative stability in the very short term, rather than any pronounced decline

We're really asking an 80/20 rule question. The premise is that some % of loan leads acquired as "easily" acquired, and, as such, would be easily acquired by AI too. Under the 80/20 rule, 80% of of "whatever" is easy and 20% is hard (and 20% of the 20% is REALLY hard!) If we assume low-volume MLOs are low-volume because they do not work particularly hard at their job, can we assume they are the "easy 80%" that AI will cannibalize?