Dropbox to reduce global workforce by about 16%, or 500 staff(blog.dropbox.com) |
Dropbox to reduce global workforce by about 16%, or 500 staff(blog.dropbox.com) |
Feels a bit like having an illustrator create a corporate Memphis graphic of a layoff.
There's also a paper-textured fern in the background.
Hopefully they'll figure this out and rebound from their predicament.
Is every company just planning to feed all of their customer data through GPT / OpenAI, or will they build their own AIs? The first choice seems risky, from a business, legal and privacy perspective. The second one would require a large amount of capital and has many other risks.
I imagine foundation models become a bit like cloud provider paas offerings vs rolling your own data centers.
I feel like HN should just autogenerate these comments now for stories like this (perhaps with a helpful response explaining what the corporation actually does do and giving some examples of corporate jobs that are a necessity at a certain size).
I’ve speculated that this is the rationale behind some of the recent layoffs. Finally we get some confirmation.
As a heavy OpenAI user, I think it is a premature optimization.
From what I read it sounded like they're making a major shift to investment in A.I. technology, and dropping departments in their company that don't align with that new direction (while aggressively hiring in the A.I. field).
Companies have shifted focus all the time in the past, and axed departments that no longer align with that vision. Meta's doing that right now with enterprise VR as they're dropping that to focus more on A.I. as well (have to jump on that A.I. bandwagon to please them shareholders, after all, which I don't doubt is half the reason Dropbox is doing this as well). But this isn't exclusive to A.I.
There's the free bingo space!
Literally every company is doing the same right now. It seems like the decision was quite simple.
Which areas? Which employment category are they cutting? Hard to tell from the message.
Even though a hundred+ QA products doing this (Chat with your files vibes etc) haven't had much success, they are ignoring the fact that trust is key to document storage, and that we haven't mastered correct context/snippet amalgamation yet - for example, one may want to include both statements that have high cosine similarity, and also statements with clashing natural language inference similarity (contractionary sentences). This gives the context window the statements needed to correctly reason and use logic from different parts of the document. Small things like order (e.g. grouping snippets from different documents together in per-document batches, and also ordering by page number the statements within each document) matter greatly.
What? This is a file storage service.
Imagine building a company that lets users store files online, seeing chatgpt released, and then laying off 16% of your company to.. use ai to store files better? I really don’t see how new ai capabilities lead to big layoffs and new opportunities for Dropbox.
snark incoming - Imagine thinking you understand the product strategy for a 14 year old, publicly traded company with thousands of employees without working there or having any sort of insider knowledge.
It's also not much of a reach to imagine use cases here. AI trained on a company's corpus of internal documents is an extremely common idea right now. DBX is sitting on a trove of data that is specifically well-suited for building bespoke, company specific AI models.
To add to that, Product leadership at technology companies has evolved to be much less technical, so they aren't going to have any deep insight about AI that, say, a software engineer who has worked in that field might have.
But hey, if in a few years Dropbox launches a popular AI-based feature I'll gladly eat my words because I'll probably be using it. They could benefit from enhancing their search functionality, for example -- but that's just a nice-to-have feature, not something revolutionary.
However, I also totally see the point, as an example: the biggest reason I like Google Photos is the automagic tagging on the pictures, I can just write any random description and it usually finds them across 10+ years of photos I have stored (not perfect, but good enough), I can see AI replicating if not even augmenting such functionalities.
I worked at a similarly sized company to Dropbox, and when I questioned product decisions I would often receive similarly smug put downs. How could you possibly think you know more than the CEO?
And then I watched over the next few years as the product strategy floundered, reorging many times without shipping anything concrete.
I suppose what I’m saying is that while your comment shuts down conversation quite effectively, it can still be wrong. Sometimes - quite frequently, in fact! - there is no man behind the curtain. Sometimes, when product decisions seem questionable, they really are questionable.
(Sorry if I have an annoyed tone; I think I'm subconsciously venting against all the times I've heard this from others in the past.)
Snark incoming. Imaging a society so shitty that you have to try to "understand the product strategy for a 14 year old publicly traded company"
That is, one society in which companies dont go about their business, aiming for sustainable growth and a healthy profit, but pivot to whatever unrelated technology (or, more often, bullshit fad) comes next, to prop their stock or to increase their valuation when they're sold.
I've worked at a pretty wide range of tech companies throughout my 15+ year career. When I was young I would ask myself "what is leadership thinking!?", my realization later in my career was simply: "oh, they're not thinking"
14 year old and younger tech companies have only existed during a tech boom period, when money flowed easy from both investors and customers. There has been zero market pressure to put thought into building products.
In the case of dropbox in particular, any long term customers (such as myself) can confirm that there has clearly not been a coherent product strategy for at least the last few years.
So we can just point out it's strategies on it's latest 10k filing, where it's investments have been and where it's gets it's money from?
Many of us have worked for long-standing public companies with thousands of employees that have embarked on product strategies that were not particularly valid.
Facebook comes to mind, for example, and its Metaverse boondoggle. Or Google and half a dozen things. Evernote, though it's not a public company, also comes to mind...
Did anybody need "insider knowledge" to know Google's Stadia was DOA? For that matter, Dropbox has tried pivoting to mail and apps (Carousel + Mailbox) in the past, and I don't know whether insider knowledge was needed to predict that failure.
I can imagine use cases for AI + Dropbox. Whether they are urgent use cases where customers see a real problem they're willing to throw money at is another question entirely.
> It's also not much of a reach to imagine use cases here. AI trained on a company's corpus of internal documents is an extremely common idea right now. DBX is sitting on a trove of data that is specifically well-suited for building bespoke, company specific AI models.
What could go wrong in dropbox invading their customer's privacy to scrap out a few pennies mining their data?
Imagine I'm a shareholder and the product strategy is either bad or being communicated to me unclearly.
> It's also not much of a reach to imagine use cases here.
It's also not much of a reach to imagine the same breathless magical thinking about AI which is happening everywhere taking over the management at Dropbox.
So far I've seen a lot of potential and exactly 0 effective applications of AI at scale. So I know which my money is on.
I'm definitely betting on AI, but the way I'm betting on AI is betting on AI companies building better AIs. I'm not betting on companies whose only involvement in AI is that they suddenly have to have it because it's the latest buzzword.
Snark incoming - if somebody at Dropbox reads this they might have an AI strategy now. I think your idea is amazing. But I think that a lot of publicly traded companies are now "doing something with AI" like a headless chicken without any deeper though on why.
But your idea is good!
They were also non-E2E encrypted for like most or all of those years. It was the main reason I didn't use it for personal backups. I use SpiderOakONE (paid) instead, which is.
So yeah, they have a fuckton of other people's documents. 100% chance. Even I admittedly use one of their free documents as a simple todo list at work. That's probably really nice data for them too.
If they aren't doing some ML based on that data, somebody at the company is not doing their job.
Then you go on saying this is a common strategy and is well suited?
Do you understand the strategy or is your comment as worthless as you suggest in your first paragraph?
Understanding product strategies are part of many users day to day lives. Don't dismiss everyone and put them on your level of understanding.
In other words, encourage this mindset wherever possible, it's going to be what causes the next wave and spike in demand for SWEs.
You’d probably be better off using a different service if it bothers you so much.
ChatGPT can come up with completely made-up answers that just seem right.
Dropbox moved beyond basic file sharing long ago. I don’t personally use all of their productivity tools, but I know a lot of people (generally business/creatives) who do.
If you try to interpret this through the lens of “Dropbox just stores files” then it won’t make sense. However, there are a lot of AI opportunities in file management. Imagine something like an AI-powered search through your documents or an AI photo search. Would be much easier to find that photo of your family standing in front of the Grand Canyon if you could just type that in.
You may not want that product, but it’s unreasonably snarky to pretend that a big company is dumb for pursuing this obvious opportunity.
File syncing and storage is a feature rather than a full product, these days. Microsoft and Google have made sure of that. You need something more to compete. So, it makes sense that Dropbox went in that direction.
But it does smell like most tech bubble in history. Every publicly traded company has to somewhat fit the last au gout du jour tech in their announcement/roadmap/hiring to satisfy shareholder and bump stock prices. Happened with the dot-com bubble, web3, metaverse, cryptocurrencies, "BigData", ...
Although I get that the idea behind is that nobody want to miss "the next big thing", so if you can afford it, might as well invest in it, and if it is a flop, oh well, but if it does end up being the actual next big thing, you might have saved your company.
CIOs love this one weird trick to boost shareholder value!
Can a utility just stay a utility?
Only companies where owner is top boss can, sometimes. The moment boss has to answer to investors, growth is required.
Only small indie utilities.
For most other things, to grow initially to serve the intended functions to as much of the target audience as possible, requires investment. Investors want that growth to continue, even if it makes little or no sense to the original objectives.
Capitalism - regulation => utilities's entire point is to capture a monopoly to then abuse it.
This is an _excellent_ use of AI, in my opinion, because even if the search results are slightly wrong (they mostly aren't), you're OK with it, and you didn't have to do anything yourself except paying for the service.
[0] https://docs.jottacloud.com/en/articles/7262803-ai-powered-p...
I guess they have Paper, but last I used it, it felt like abandonware.
I could see value in using a chat-like interface with dropbox:
> "Give me the budget for the R&D team from 2019"
Google and Microsoft can do much outcompete them with their storage SaaS products.
Also I always hate “to those departing…” as if it was their idea. These emails always promise fully owning the decision but they never deliver.
"Mr. Robot, categorize our customers in a monetizable way by inspecting the data they hold in their accounts."
Maybe they'll come up with something of value to bolt onto what they do today, or maybe they'll add a totally different product to their portfolio, or maybe they'll pivot away from their current business entirely, or maybe they'll just waste a bunch of money chasing the current fad.
I can think of plenty. Text-based image search, "find the latest TPI report last modified by so-and-so", etc.
Which isn't to say that Dropbox won't spend most of its efforts thinking up features that most users plainly don't need or want, and in cranking out buggy versions of these non-features at the expense of their core product. Like all these companies, once they get sufficiently long in the tooth.
Anyway, good luck to the former Dropboxers, I hope they land on their feet.
On this thread, there’s the following sentiment… “Dropbox has access to your data so they are well positioned to do some AI stuff on your data.” But also you have your data so you could work with really any party you want, and Dropbox has few advantages by being an existing custodian. Custodian status probably is not the differentiating factor in a race to build AI tools.
AI optimism. I just don’t see the argument. I don’t see how it is good for Dropbox, or the enthusiastic pundits, or even me! (I use the tools, too, but my income and quality of life have not skyrocketed.) My suspicion is that things like Dropbox laying off 16% becoming part of the AI optimism narrative – and AI optimism in general – has little to do with the prospects of AI and much to do with the reactive patterns of opinionated storytellers.
Specifically, I think people enthusiastic about AI prospects are enthusiastic because it is the one empowering (encouraging) response they can take… not because it is warranted. That’s not criticism, just an exploration, and I’m well-aware that I could be wrong.
This is a layoff announcement. We shouldn’t expect any AI realism from it.
As a private individual, yes. However if you are a company you might not be legally able to send your data to just any party or it might be a hassle to set up. If you have a contract with Dropbox already…
What has AI got to do with me putting my files in the cloud so I can sync them across my devices?
As someone laid off 2 weeks ago from a company with much less notoriety, I cringe at the idea of having to now compete with 500 of you.
Good luck out there.
As an European, I don't think I will ever get used to the fact that in the US people can be told "go home, you're fired" like that, effective immediately.
It means that I can be more flexible in pursuing opportunities. Businesses also tend to be more risk-seeking because the downside of hiring someone is lower. That benefits me as an employee because it is much easier to get hired.
I’ve been laid off, so I also felt the negative consequences. The key for me was building an emergency fund. Granted, if a person is in an employer's market, the short notice system is terrible.
Replacing the Dropbox client with Maestral https://maestral.app meant a much happier system with a lighter application running. Also no prompts for the SD card to be uploaded.
When Dropbox limited an account to 3 devices, it made sense to use Google Drive more.
Google kept changing the naming and functionality of its client. The final blow, though, is the way that they insist on showing a screen of files instead of the folders that were carefully created.
A lot of people don't use folders very much or at all and that's definitely the trend. But it means that all the work somebody does in organizing their files is thrown out the window.
Google Drive seems like it's more and more forcing people into having a Google Account even if they use a hotmail or yahoo email address.
iCloud with a family subscription means that a family of 5 can have all of their devices and files backed up for $10/month. BackBlaze for laptops and desktops is $7/month these days so $10/month seems like a reasonable deal.
Dropbox decided that the business world was their market and that's reasonable.
For individuals, there still seems to be a market for file serving with no ads, good security and easy access for people regardless of their email domain. Say sharing photos from a family trip or the soccer games your kid played in.
That's a much leaner headcount than what I would expect for a company with as large a market footprint as Dropbox.
Also, what were these 500 people doing anyway? Dropbox has basically been the same product for years.
I'm assuming you're just talking about your personal experience with their consumer product, because this statement is laughably false. Dropbox has made a tons of changes and acquisitions to beef up their enterprise offerings, which is clearly where they've been focused, and where the money is.
>Role Description We are looking for a technical leader to help shape the Machine Learning agenda for Dropbox’s new initiatives. This will involve developing high impact ML solutions that touch hundreds of millions of people and a lot of data. From images to documents in every language, using the full range of Machine Learning techniques from deep learning, interacting with modern LLMs (natural language), computer vision, etc. and executing everywhere from mobile devices to large clusters on our back-end infrastructure.
They pretty much don't know what they don't know and are looking for someone to build it for them.
If I had to hazard a guess at the strategy, they are looking to build an in-house multi-modal model to power enterprise search.
* How many are going to be fired.
* When will employee know they are fired.
* Severance package.
No amount of thought and prayer are going to help, straight to the point.
These transitions are never easy, but I’m determined to ensure that Dropbox is at the forefront of the AI era, just as we were at the forefront of the shift to mobile and the cloud"
Key takeaway, CEO thinks shift to AI is as consequential to his business as the shift from landlines to cell phones Et al.
AI is super cool, but at least for storage of my files in the cloud I prefer something "dumb" to be honest
AI is going to be extremely useful when I can query my files as a knowledge base directly. Like game-changer useful.
The startup I was at recently laid of 15%. I'm pretty sure it wasn't for (public) optics, because the layoff didn't get any press coverage.
And based on the startup's business, I very much doubt the layoff was triggered by ChatGPT's success.
My best guess would be behind-the-scenes VC strategizing, but this is happening even with publicly traded companies like DropBox.
Is there evidence that this is the specific reasoning that companies are using?
Seems like a poor excuse to cut people.
I've brought this up before to their support team. But I guess they aren't interested in small fish accounts and only want 2TB whales signing up.
To be clear: I'm a fan. Just sincerely don't know the benefit of what could be a very targeted and strategic company in having so much staff.
I see this same comment on every single one of these layoff threads and they always seem to be a bit disconnected.
Would anybody else be content with mass layoff messages in JSON format? { severance, healthcare, perks }
I’m okay without the explanations or attempt at empathy thats partially designed for other stakeholders like vendors who want to know the company is healthy
Just take the media L and move on, I bet there are people that would like them for that approach and attract talent. Its pretty insufferable to be around employees that actually like the “family” coddling talk so if they’re not there to begin with then its a better work environment
Yeah, well good luck finding people with actual AI experience right now because everybody's looking for them. They might have been better off to retrain some of the folks they're going to layoff. Hiring people with these skills can take a while. Maybe they could be bringing some folks up to speed in the meantime?
Now they're creating completely new products to include with the same subscription that have little or nothing to do with the original product.
Document writing and signing, password storage, screen capture, video review/approval process, invoices (beta)...
Imagine selling Rolodex in the post-email era.
How many of the laid off "team" members could have been retrained?
ChatGPT will just generate your documents on the fly from prompts you memorize.
These generated documents are presumably files? And the long list of prompts would ideally be stored somehow, likely in a file.
combined with the biden depression, this makes it a good idea to fire employees and gain this new source of income.
Honestly I think it's actually a pretty fantastic development if that's the direction. I don't use Dropbox much, nor have I used aifiles (due to sending all of your data to OpenAI) - but the idea of being able to not have to manually and tediously look over terabytes of files to completely reorganize all of your files into a better directory hierarchy, and tag each files with meaningful labels, etc sounds phenomenal.
Obviously there are some implementation details for this to be not awful - for example: 1) only local models for local data, 2) making the changes on e.g. ZFS (to allow rollback) or as some type of optional 'overlay' view to switch back and forth from the original to ai-organized, etc. and 3) having thresholds and logic for what may be considered 'duplicates' to be removed, and how to better compress data
As for the de-duplication and processing: this could be very good for dropbox in that, e.g. if a person wants to completely re-encode all of their image files or video files with AV1, the resulting data could be cut in half or more - which saves Dropbox storage space. After which, neural perceptual hashing could be done on all of the files and a threshold of similarity could do de-duplication on a perceptual basis (for example, keep the bigger size file that is 99% similar to a 2x downsized version, and re-encode it). User preference to keep things like tiff files completely intact or any other lossless encoding of their choosing could be good options as well
There's definitely a strange disparity between the computation cost for deploying a decent model to do this compared to the storage cost - but if a (perhaps even non-LLM!) small model is created to be able to plow through data at fast rates could be deployed it may make sense.
Or perhaps the type of semantic compression that LLMs do are of interest for making a new type of lossy compression algorithm of which Dropbox is interested. It is certainly interesting that even the largest LLMs we are aware of contain only a few hundred GBs of weights, but have information on various topics from Pokemon to electric engineering, to cellular biology, to cake decorating - yet one instance of the best compressed pubmed database I can think of (only containing the small fraction of cell bio and med part of the LLM - perhaps 2% of it) is like 60GB with Zstd compressed (yes, yes, I know lossy vs lossless - but still) - which would be probably more like 1/2 or 1/4 of a typical SoTA LLM. So clearly lossy compression via including semantic info is hugely beneficial over typical lossy compression techniques (and perhaps one could argue, what often lossy compression algorithms try to model in the first place, in a very rudimentary way).
I mean I wanted to store some old tax returns, medical bills and crap in DB, AI comes in and decides "bah, this is crap!", delete files silently to make space for more exciting stuff. Everyone is happy now!
The idea that some sort of complex algorithm should be used indicates a misunderstanding of what business management actually consists of.
It is much more social science than engineering.
Yes, in this case the corporate goal is to fire 500 people as a sacrifice to the finance gods.
If the goal was 'refocus strategy', you'd probably want to actually assess your business and determine who is no longer necessary, and you would doubtfully end up at a nice round number
> it makes me think that they decided "how many people do we need to sacrifice to appease the finance gods" rather than "how many of these roles are really needed to achieve the goals we set ourselves".
Any big layoff involves, or is possibly the result of, shifting goals. Company goals change, especially as changing economics makes them more or less possible.
Specially important since company was founded and grown to employ thousands of dropboxers without any money from finance gods.
500 is also a businessy-salesy round number, compared to 512 which is what an engineer would have considered a round number. Gives some clues as to where the number came from.
They're just following the trend, or listening to the ridiculous demands of investors following the trend.
> I thought from one of the smaller companies no one would notice.
> Like one of the cab companies.
>> Fire one million.
> But 500,000...
> One million. Fine, sir.
> Sorry to have disturbed you.
There is no substitute for being organized.
If the AI can interpret what I mean, find the file, link me to the sources and distill the information and context, it will be major productivity boom.
So while as a personal user you might not see much potential for AI (though I do), I'm sure there's huge opportunities for their business customers to use AI tooling on the many corporate documents and files they already stored on Dropbox. Also if you look at DBX's current offerings you can see they've branched out from just storing files. Signatures (HelloSend), "DocSend", password vaults, etc. Focusing on the potential for AI to solve problems for their business customers makes sense to me.
AI is allowing for massive monitization of what was previously "flat file" style data.
Dropbox, as I mentioned, has always 'not been you friend' - now they are just a more powerful 'not your friend'.
I'm mindful with what I put on cloud storage (mainly photo/video backups with Google Photos). I'm fine bumping up as I use more, but I don't feel like you suddenly deserve to pay for 2TB cause you went 3MB over the 200GB limit. And for how cheap as storage is these days, I think the pricing models should be reconsidered.
I pay for Netflix and I watch less than 2 movies a month. Am I angry because I'm paying for the right to watch multiple movies/shows every day which I will never have time for? No. I get what I want for a price I'm willing to pay.
Every time you buy a piece of software or hardware you get features you don't care about. Do I get angry that these features are included? Of course not. I just don't use them.
But somehow when it comes to quotas people feel like the price should somehow correspond to the cost of delivering the service. But it doesn't. It's just price segmentation, and as long as the pricing tiers are clearly advertised I don't think you have any right to be mad.
They don’t want to sell you a cheap commodity. They want to sell you convenience at higher margin.
I needed about 20 GB of storage. Why the hell should I have to pay for 100 times that?
Since I switched, I've slowly grown to 30 GB, but I still have plenty of room before I need to go to the next tier and pay another $1/month.
Oh well, between Amazon syncing my photos as part of Prime and GDrive I have plenty of cloud storage for my needs.
I think I remember the tier prices being roughly the same since the service came out.
I get that salaries went up which adds to price, but over time it feels like storage price should go towards zero.
The answer is you're not really paying for the storage. You're paying for the servicing. The application with its network connectivity and data transfer, plus the overhead costs of billing and support when necessary.
The proposition may look like "$100 for 10 TB", but that's not a ratio that you can halve or whatever. It's $100 for 10 TB and all the network servicing and support apparatus, which doesn't change if the storage amount does.
It's not that Dropbox couldn't offer a tier for less than 100/year, it's that they don't want to. We around HN know about reducing headaches by avoiding pathologically cheap customers. Dropbox makes more profit overall by getting some of the would-be cheapos to round up to 100/year and letting the rest walk.
When you have less scale, you need to charge a bit more for your initial level.
This is just some rando internet person making reductive statements about a company whose current offerings they are unaware of and future product roadmap they have never seen.
Maybe DBX sucks at executing theirs. Maybe their strategy sucks. I don't know. I'm not claiming to. All I am claiming is that there is some strategy at the leadership level right now at DBX that appears to involve AI - and any comments beyond that are purely speculative.
I have no idea what their strategy is. Neither do you. Neither does OP. That is all i said.
My message is that OP doesn't know DBX's product strategy. I don't either. I never claimed to.
> Then you go on saying this is a common strategy and is well suited?
Sorry, where did I do that?
> Do you understand the strategy or is your comment as worthless as you suggest in your first paragraph?
No, I do not. I never claimed to.
I describe AI as a new intern or assistant. Pretty useful, but don't bet your company on their answer.
Dropbox also never hired at a rate beyond their rate of revenue growth.
This leads back to one of the AI promises if the earlier Internet, before WWW when Usenet, Gopher, and a number of other ideas, were where we were heading, and for a time after WWW's popularity before search engines hit certain quality/coverage levels: an intelligent search agent trained on information about you that would go off and scour the various data resources for you and return an optimal set of results after a while, perhaps even idly looking around and finding things you might search for but hadn't thought to ask it for yet.
Can you expand on this. Why is this the case. Does it even mean increase in engg headcount, if so why. Can you link to somewhere if possible. Always had this question, and this pattern is very similar in other places. So maybe it works?
To butcher a quote from Grandpa Simpson:
“I used to be ‘the target customer’, but then they changed what ‘the target customer’ was. Now I’m not ‘the target customer’ anymore and ‘the target customer’ seems weird and scary. It’ll happen to you!
Isn't it in the nature of tech industry though? If a company "just is", it doesn't need to do any R&D work, so it's not a tech company any more.
Rule 1: Be an enterprise account that uses the "Call us for a quote" option, and does not complain about feature changes or removals
Rule 2: Don't break Rule 1
I do agree with this observation of yours, fwiw.
If they did actually kill it, I can always export and move somewhere else, though it'd be a pain in the ass. In the meantime, it's like the only Google product I think is actually good and worth paying for.
If the software is already built, it would be the same dev cost to offer 50gb, or 10TB.
Sure there might be some customer support issues that don’t scale the same way, but then why not only offer customer support for higher tiers ?
But I'd be fine with more reasonable increments in steps of X smaller amount of GB.
Meh. You could've said the same thing about companies leveraging dot-com, or going mobile first. All these were a net gain for investors and society.
"The future is now old man."
You'd be surprised.
>"The future is now old man."
Well, September 4, 476 AD was also "the future" of much better pasts for Romans.
Something else?
1. that companies should have specific product areas and focus, and not pivot all over the place, as mere profit-seeking machines.
2. that companies embrace all kinds of BS trends, hyped technologies, and empty vacuum BS solutions looking for a problem (from NFT, web3, metaverse, blockchain)
3. that companies (as in this case) also embrace valid technologies (like LLMs) that have no real application to their products, and will just retrofit them in some ugly BS way nobody asked for, just to send the signal "we're still cool, we're getting on the next bandwaggon, buy our stock"
4. that the current behavior (actually, for decades now) is not about "sustainable growth and healthy profit" but about stock market games, and about endless unsustainable growth that destroys their core offerings and alienates customers
2. So what? People embrace all kinds of trends. And companies are made of people. This is basically a tautology...it's only a trend of people are embracing it. Also zero of your examples are the topic here.
3. This goes back to my original post...we don't know how they plan to use LLMs. It might be useful, it might not be.
4. Just pure cynicism. Some of what you're saying happens at some companies. But not most.
If I succeed, do you want an invite?
So I wouldn't feel bad about having a "low" rank in deliberately selective sample of humanity.
Is that true? I'd be shocked if it costs Google more than $2/month to have the average 100GB user's files sitting in storage. Maybe if I was constantly uploading and downloading, but most people push things up there and then they just sit.
Google Cloud Storage is $0.02/ GB + a myriad of other charges for listing, accessing, replication etc. All while storage remains one of the lower margin offerings for the hyperscale clouds - they keep it cheap to attract high margin compute.
Now add to that the cost of building and maintaining the myriad of apps, APIs, integrations etc. for a consumer facing storage service and $2/mo for 100GB would be very very slightly profitable at best.
In that spirit, here's me doing this about AI at Dropbox:
- Get consent from users and train a personalized AI on user files, to answer questions like, "Where is my meeting with Thiago?"
- Provide built-in support for number crunching on unstructured meeting notes: "How much revenue did we make, from last quarter's notes?"
- Automatically fine-tune a model using your own writing so that ChatGPT talks more like you
- Apply an AI to recognize security threats in your files("Hey you might have stored a secret in plaintext in file Y. Do you want to encrypt it?")
I can see DropBox making some interesting features for their products around AI. That’s going to require manpower to do it. Manpower that’s probably a little nervous about staying at a company that just did layoffs.
What if it’s more about using customer data to Dropbox’s advantage? Combined with the telemetry you can’t turn off, they can mine the shit out of users.
* find someone that will actually want to pay extra for their subscription on that.
This is genuinely blind to anything that's happened in AI over the last 6-12 months. The data that is the most valuable to AI is exactly all of the random, unstructured data (product requirements, decisioning documents, engineering designs, process documentation, etc etc) that has been shared across teams.
> I just can’t even come up with plausible uses for AI that meaningfully change the company enough to require a layoff.
requiring a layoff no, certainly me neither. There is definitely a bit of "compliment sandwich" happening in this letter. The layoffs were likely just a long time coming for a company that has been rather stagnant for quit some time.
> We began by collecting a representative set of donated document images that match what users might upload, such as receipts, invoices, letters, etc. To gather this set, we asked a small percentage of users whether they would donate some of their image files for us to improve our algorithms. At Dropbox, we take user privacy very seriously and thus made it clear that this was completely optional, and if donated, the files would be kept private and secure. We use a wide variety of safety precautions with such user-donated data, including never keeping donated data on local machines in permanent storage, maintaining extensive auditing, requiring strong authentication to access any of it, and more.
Google has spent billions in R&D for gmail, google docs/sheets, photos. And now I have to choose between deleting my old stuff or paying for extra storage. Figuring out where my data went is too much work, so I subscribed. Other people will delete old photos/attachments/files so they don't have to upgrade to the next pricing tier. Price segmentation works.
If I had a car that could hold my family of 4, and then I have another kid and my only option to upgrade from there is a school bus, I'm gonna be understandably annoyed. And you could just as easily say "well they don't make enough on cars so they need more people buying buses."
The question isn't "who is no longer necessary".
The question is "do we think we can cut 500 roles (Y/N)"
The 2nd question is a reasonable and useful business assessment. The first question is not relevant and has no real answer.
Leadership, based on their understanding and information make the decision to cut 500 and create a mandate to make it so. Then management is forced to decide who gets the axe.
It would basically be impossible to drive the decision the other way. You can't asses every individual for necessity. What would the threshold even be? The threshold depends on the number of people you want to fire.
There is no super computer that can calculate the outcome from firing \ 499 workers vs 500
Yes, and I'm saying they shouldn't.
>If they fail, they will fail. Companies are mere profit seeking machines. Perhaps you are thinking of non-profit orgs?
No, I'm thinking of the idea of the civic responsibility of companies, and of a market that serves society, not just maximizes profit. Perhaps the barbaric 2023 is not ready enough for it.
>So what? People embrace all kinds of trends. And companies are made of people.
Yes, including BS trends, detrimental to them, their families, or their communities. And, like companies, should embrace less BS trends and more good trends.
>This goes back to my original post...we don't know how they plan to use LLMs. It might be useful, it might not be.
We do know it has nothing to what people got into Dropbox for: simple file sync and offline copies.
>Just pure cynicism. Some of what you're saying happens at some companies. But not most.
Simple starry-eyed market fanboyism. See how two can play the ad hominem game?
>I remain unconvinced of the usefulness of the Syncthing sync model on iOS
https://forum.syncthing.net/t/syncthing-for-ios/16045/4
So basically it's not an alternative at all to Dropbox
And to be honest, most of the files I sync, I never access on a phone anyway. So it would still be useful even without Android support.
Not sure how common my setup is, But I have desktop both at home and at work. And I use git and synching, to sync most of the stuff seamlessly. That said I mostly work from home nowadays, so I mostly use my work comp to speed up compilation, or run tests, dockers, databases, etc.
* Not trying to be an asshole. There are plenty of iPhone only app, that I sometimes** wish I could use, so I know how you feel.
** But not too much, otherwise I would switch by now :))
(I don't have proper backups beyond Dropbox, because I'm pretty happy for stuff I've actually deleted to stay deleted. Just, in case of a hard drive failure or something similar, I can sync back from Dropbox. That's all I feel I need. Maybe there's something better?)
With end-to-end encryption you can transfer data with an untrusted server as intermediary, which syncthing doesn't support.
The time macOS changed my default to having all my files in the cloud rather than local was a truely scarring experience.
The price is high and ‘family sharing’ is a minefield.
An FTP server already wouldn't serve my needs given that there's no such thing as mobile sync to an FTP server.
The irritating thing with a lot of software is that they start out like a hammer and in 10 years it's a multi-dimensional VR rangefinder with email. Well that's super cool but I want my hammer back.
I really don't think there are many existing companies that "pivoted" to blockchain and NFT. Certainly not a majority.
https://about.fb.com/news/2022/05/introducing-digital-collec...
I have seen many companies announce that they would look into blockchain and NFT. Which is exactly what Dropbox is saying now for AI.
Blockchain there were a lot of hiring and experiments for sure. Actually to try to pivot a company to it after these experiments, very little.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/video-games/2023/01/04/square...
https://decrypt.co/121872/ubisoft-rabbids-nfts-sandbox
https://vanguard-x.com/blockchain/nfts-are-coming-to-youtube...
The current “wave” of AI and deep learning and whatnot has been going on for almost a decade, longer than blockchain and definitely longer than NFTs if you ask me. Not saying that it’s not overhyped, but it’s definitely not a new hype.
I also had a batch of photos to process from an event and updated my Lightroom. The new Denoise did a really nice job with these relatively noisy/highish ISO pics. And the Adaptive preset to punch up the subject (speakers at an event) was pretty nice too.
Not game changing IMO but a nice workflow addition.
NFTs on the other hand always felt like beanie babies. Blockchain in the enterprise distributed ledger sense felt like it had some potential use cases although I was always pretty skeptical which seems to have been justified.
For Dropbox, I predict that this will go exactly the way Dropbox Paper went.
Not nearly everything in AI is ChatGPT, not quite all is NLP for that matter, there's still plenty of interesting things which are improving. Dropbox might well be pivoting to improve their e.g. photo/video offering with AI, but they might as well have started that 5 years ago.
My non techie wife and all her friends love ChatGPT and use it daily. My kids friends use it to do all their homework. Which is pissing off my kids as I won’t let them use it.
LLMs do. Guess we'll see if it's really flexible enough to fit into a lot of business models, but it's not exactly the same thing.
I don't see it as the wildest thing that say, a corp using cloud storage might want an LLM trained on all their documents so instead of searching for where X employee who left the company 3 years ago stored some information that was on page 9 of a document from 2017, you just ask the model and it pulls the info and links you to the source doc.
Lacks an exclusion mechanism, so icons leak in
Includes STL files as photos and fails to display them
Sometimes misses photos for no obvious reason
You guys are reading way, way too much into this press release.
People here are acting they've abandoned their existing product and is betting the company on AI, when it could just as easily just be what every single major company has said recently ("we're exploring AI").
Well Blockchain promised a lot. I remember that in the beginning, I found it interesting and thought it would be the next big thing. Now we have had more than a decade to realize that Blockchain doesn't solve anything other than cryptocurrencies (and it's not clear if we want cryptocurrencies).
So yeah, I could totally imagine that many promises of LLMs today are similar to those of Blockchain back then. Let's see how it evolves in the next few years, I guess.
Then again, never try to convince someone of something when their salary depends on believing otherwise.
Uniswap likewise has billions in daily volume. Again, that's significant. I really don't understand how the hacker news groupthink can see a piece of technology that enables something completely brand new - decentralized market making - getting used daily to move billions of dollars around and say "there's absolutely nothing there".
Maybe you think there's no killer app because you hang out on upvote-centric site like hacker news and reddit where people downvote the hell out of things that contradict their narrative. Hacker news is a groupthink bubble.
There's many other examples. Look at how often people brought up energy usage and GPU shortages when NFTs get brought up. Then look how often it gets brought up when LLMs get brought up. It's night and day. None of these people cared about the environment. They didn't like crypto so it was a talking point against it - that's it. Because now, ETH is on proof of stake but everyone and their dog are buying 4090s so they can make waifus with Stable Diffusion. And all those "you're melting the planet people!" are conspicuously quiet.
What exactly is the killer app of LLM? A bunch of writing tools for SEO spam? Does anyone seriously read what ChatGPT writes and think this thing could do real literature or journalism? Everybody wants to use AI to write, nobody wants to read what AI writes. The only real "killer app" I'll give it is Github copilot. Most everything else is froth.
When NFTs were trendy, I read constantly on here they were beanie babies, that they were naming a star, whatever. You know what bubble I saw excited about them? Not the tech bros, but artists interested in a new way of monetizing their work. Go read Grammy award winnner RAC's twitter - he addresses people saying he "scammed" people by @ mentioning those he sold NFTs to and asking if they feel scammed. Fans of his bought the NFTs so they had a digital collectible representing his album, he got money to make art.
When Babe Ruth signs a baseball, it's still just a dingy baseball, but it has emotional significance to people. NFTs were the digital equivalent of that. I'm not surprised techies that have no art in their lives struggle to wrap their head around that.
But what is disappointing is that now Stable Diffusion takes a bunch of art that real humans tirelessly made, uses some neural net to rejigger it, and tech bros will die in the trenches making sure we legitimaze this quasi-plagriasm. For all the talks of NFTs being scams and generative AI being substance, I see one technology that incentivized real humans to make real art and another technology that does the opposite, takes money out of artists pockets so people can use algorithms to lift their style.
I'm not trying to oversimplify these topics but it gets tiresome reading the exact same tired talking points about generative AI being substantive and web3 being all scams when there's strong arguments indicating otherwise. It's just impossible to read them when on sites like these they get faded out because you're not allowed to have divergent opinions without a bunch of defensive dorks downvoting you into oblivion.
There's one last important point I want to make. Sites like Reddit and Hacker News and especially mainstream media are unduly influenced by big corporations. True blockchain use cases give power back to the individual. Sure, there's plenty of VC pump and dump shitcoins in crypto such as Solana and NEAR but the long term real utility is about the individual. Meanwhile, LLMs are almost exclusively trained and served by massive corporations, the same massive corporations that can influence the media you read. If a journalist wants to write an article about crypto energy usage, they'll write it. If they want to write about LLM energy usage, you have some of the richest, most powerful people in the world with some of the premier PR firms in the world who can influence that journalist and that publication in all sorts of ways. So critical stories about AI are more likely to get buried than critical stories about crypto. Keep that in mind.
To me, the biggest difference between the AI hype and the crypto hype is that crypto had the skeptics and the critics in the room - as it should. But AI is badly, badly lacking those skeptics and critics.
And the idea that an NFT has any "emotional resonance" is just weird.
> I really don't understand how the hacker news groupthink can [...] say "there's absolutely nothing there".
Blockchain doesn't solve anything other than cryptocurrencies that was not solved better before. But that leaves this one thing: cryptocurrencies; blockchains does enable cryptocurrencies in a way that was not possible before.
The problem I have with cryptocurrencies is that I don't want them. That's not a technical argument, that's more a preference of what I believe society should do.
So there is not nothing, but web3 is bullshit IMHO.
> You know what bubble I saw excited about them? Not the tech bros, but artists interested in a new way of monetizing their work.
Well, it's hard not to be excited by something that you don't really understand but that may bring you money. Doesn't mean NFTs are desirable. BTW you talk about them in the past, so somehow you do realize that apparently they were not desirable enough to survive, right?
> Meanwhile, LLMs are almost exclusively trained and served by massive corporations
I totally agree with that. I don't want Big Data to steal my data, use it to train models, and sell that back to me. I wish there would be a way to account for copyright and licensing in a decent manner, but I fear that the rich will win (that's capitalism, right?).
Just as much as I believe that Bitcoin made more harm than good, I believe that generative AIs have the potential to make more harm than good. The problem is that companies don't think about whether they should do something - only whether it is profitable. And people typically love to not think about it and just happily try and support all those cool techs.
In an enterprise, it can be extremely difficult to ensure your permissions are what you want them to be: that people can share things easily with the right groups, but also that sensitive data is not inadvertently exposed. Dropbox in particular excels at sharing documents with others outside your company, but that is also where there is obviously the most risk.
Currently, I find Dropbox's enterprise permissions management tools pretty difficult to use. There are loads of options and it's too easy to get something "wrong" if you inadvertently miss checking the right checkbox. It's not hard for me to see how AI tools could help improve this situation, and especially to provide additional capabilities in the DLP (data loss prevention) space that would make it easier to detect misconfigured access.
This seems the exact opposite of what the current crop of AI is good at.
Yeah, last thing I want when trying to share a file with people outside of my organization is some opaque kafkaesque chatgpt-wannabe model telling me "I’m sorry Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that".
1. Letting users enter desired permissions setting in a natural language, and then the AI recommending checkbox settings, and, importantly, explaining these settings.
2. Useful as a monitoring/alerting system for DLP. Most DLP systems already use some sort of machine learning for identifying sensitive docs.
3. Easily running "test scenarios" to show to admins who can and can't get access to particular docs.
There is a huge chasm between "AI owns all my permission settings" to "AI can make it easier and more robust for me to understand what my permission settings should be."
> Currently, I find Dropbox's enterprise permissions management tools pretty difficult to use.
These two sentences were one after the other. So which way is it?
That’s only because it failed (and the jury is still out on that). If it works they’ll conquer an entirely new market right from the start.
Certainly a much better long term strategy than hoping they can keep up their advertising revenue.
The "metaverse" is ironically set up to be Facebook's walled garden. It has no other use, it cannot be repurposed or made modular in any way. It's not a standalone product that say, integrates with Google Ads, something that they could try to offload to some other company.
It's Zuck's baby, and in the middle of slow and protracted crib death.
Facebook has their own platform but it's built on top of others so it can be choked off. Facebook wants its own OS.
The last 15 years of tech says otherwise. Tesla is the most obvious counterpoint to this example. I don't think the Metaverse is useful, but my issue with Facebook isn't that he poured 30B into what was essentially R&D.
That's just your hindsight bias. Lot of companies have spent billions of dollars chasing apparently worthless product ideas. Some of them turned out to be big hits - electric car in 2009, social media based on 140 characters posting limit, online bookstore, a website to check out pics of your classmates and poke them etc.
I like the fact that Facebook was audacious enough to spend 40B dollars on trying out something new. If successful, it would have opened up a huge new field for tinkering, just like the wave of social media companies in 2009-10.
Literally every company. That doesn't mean that a strategy doesn't exist and is actively curated and maintained by people whose full-time job it is to do so. It's always an educated guess at best. But it's pretty silly to come into a thread like this and be like "psh they store files what could they possibly do with AI".
I would have thought HN would celebrate a company that's publicly decided to stop fucking with the Wi-Fi.
Ooh betting on a failure? That is the easiest bet ever. If I bet on everything failing, I would win 99% of the time.
If I built a company and eventually found myself in extremely high value (ie, 9 figures), I'd be looking to retire ASAP. That would be it. I won capitalism. Time to spend the rest of my life on Maui sipping Mai-Tais on the beach.
Why anybody would want to continue to work when they already have enough wealth to live an extremely lavish lifestyle without working ever again is beyond me.
Is probably extremely boring - I have never had more fun than when solving problems, life without working on something interesting sounds insufferable to me
How long would I be able to sit on Maui sipping Mai-Tais? Getting massages, ... and more ... whatever I want, whenever I want it ... that is a curse actually.
Surrounded by fake people everyone wanting a piece of the wealth trickle down to them.
On a personal experience, I was a lot happier when I bought my first house, a rundown estate that was the cheapest on the street that then I had to work to improve upon it, ended up replacing most inside and out, some parts I learned to do myself - I ended up remodeling it piecemeal but so, so satisfying
My second house is very respectable, newer, larger, technically incomparably better, it is not even the same ballpark ... yet my new house never provided me with the same joy.
Be careful what you wish for.
With that perspective, the best thing to do is keep on pushing. Despite whatever pain and headache that might bring, it's one act our short lives can use to push against entropy and the dying universe.
If I ever come into such wealth, I'll spend it all solving as much as I can through my direct involvement.
Pet hypothesis: A lot of us say that, not being in the position to. But when you finally exit the working class and are no longer required to work, people tend to work on passion projects instead. Sitting on the beach gets boring after a while.
There is strong correlation between people who find themselves in 9 figures (outside of inheritance) and people who have completely opposite worldview from yours. If you make money to retire to Maui, you will take the first off ramp which allows you to do it which is way before you get into 9 figures.
I'm fairly sure that there are many people like this out there, but for others that just... isn't a problem?
Personally, I quit my last job because I felt like I need to learn some new technology, work on a few personal projects, write blog posts and so on. Since, I've done a little of the above (in addition to improving the security of my homelab and running my own CA), but also took a month off to just enjoy watching videos, reading articles, playing video games, as well as do physical labor around the farm.
And frankly, everything feels enjoyable so far - both intellectually stimulating tasks, physically intensive labor like cutting trees and chopping firewood, as well as passively consuming content, or even zoning out a bit occasionally and having a slow day. Though I can't comment on how long each of those would be satisfying for, that also depends on the person.
I can easily imagine someone enjoying a lavish and relaxed lifestyle and never getting tired of it, though.
If I ever came into such wealth, I think I'd spend my time going back to college to study linguistics. Maybe document some dying languages. Try to contribute to humanity a bit.