Nice, round number. I wonder if that was a carefully thought out coincidence, or they fiddled with the numbers a bit until they got the right payroll savings then rounded it to the nearest 100. I suspect the latter - when I see a nice, round number of people being fired 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".
Anyway, good luck to the former Dropboxers, I hope they land on their feet.
Exactly this. Unless the sum of payroll cut roughly equals the increase of interest payments in their debt load, I call absolute BS on the "challenging market dynamics".
They're just following the trend, or listening to the ridiculous demands of investors following the trend.
The article says “about 16%”. I don’t think the number in the article should be taken as an exact count.
> 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.
When one number is given as exact, and the other prefixed with "about", your intuition is that the exact number is not in fact an exact count? That is very odd.
There is a threshold of number of employees let go (maybe at location or total, I dunno) where they have to do certain things, called the WARN act. Companies aren't putting out press releases about layoffs because they want to.
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.
Round number (whichever base is rounded off to) also shows it wasn't some company-wide movement to cut some fat but someone come up with the number beforehand and told underlings to make it happen
Counterpoint is that there is nothing wrong with a round number and it is perfectly compatible with setting appropriate resource targets for corporate goals.
The idea that some sort of complex algorithm should be used indicates a misunderstanding of what business management actually consists of.
>Counterpoint is that there is nothing wrong with a round number and it is perfectly compatible with setting appropriate resource targets for corporate goals.
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 isn't a driver of the decision. Who gets fired is a detail that gets worked out after the fact.
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
Of course you decide on a number first. Do you think the CEO has any idea what the names of all their peons are? Much less which ones would be reasonsble to get rid of.
The whole letter seemed pretty well written and as good as it could be, the severance and benefits are generous, all good except for this part. It reminded me of Gavin Belson laying off the Nucleus team. If you're "taking full ownership" but there's no financial effect on you, what does that mean exactly? You felt sad for a few minutes while you were writing the letter?
It means they are taking the credit for making a good business decision. When the share prices go up because of the layoffs, he wants to make sure everyone knows that he is responsible for it.
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
"As the world moved from physical film to digital photography, or from land lines to wireless communication, or from DVD rentals to streaming, opportunity and disruption went hand-in-hand. Companies that embraced a new reality and took decisive action did well. Companies that held onto the past or tried to have it all did not.
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.
The money is in enterprise and with all of a company's files they're well positioned to do something AIish on them. Not sure there's anything really there but also don't think they have much choice but to jump on the hype train
I guess things like dropbox passwords are going to get even less attention now. That’s a pity because I actually like it and think it has a lot of potential.
> In an ideal world, we’d simply shift people from one team to another. And we’ve done that wherever possible. However, our next stage of growth requires a different mix of skill sets, particularly in AI and early-stage product development. We’ve been bringing in great talent in these areas over the last couple years and we'll need even more.
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.
If every company is doing AI it sort of sounds similar to the ICO/coin phase of crypto hype curve and the every company having a dotcom/ecommerce department of the dot com boom/bust (which is actually the case nowadays). Because AI has more respect in tech circles than crypto did I suspect people aren't calling BS as much. It could very well be that in X years a lot of companies have AI doing bot types of work. It could also be a lot of if..then..ifelse or document search index stuff with "AI" lipstick on it.
Maybe they want to develop something that allows organizations to better utilize the information on their Dropbox account. Feed that to language model and let people ask questions.
As an example: Dropbox can answer questions from the documents you've shared with them. They stand a good chance as anyone else to build a "personal chatgpt" / "enterprise chatgpt". Dropbox is also big on photos, I believe, the latest advancements give them a shot at taking on Google Photos.
I actually love this angle. Personally trained models based on our own data. They have the storage infra. They also have a means of distributed compute since they are installed on so many PCs. If they werent an annoying and aimless product I would be excited!
> Personally trained models based on our own data.
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.
Compared to my mindset a decade ago I've become so cynical about the whole SV tech scene. There's value there, of course: Dropbox was a fantastic service when it first came out. But these companies are incentivized to keep expanding until they occupy the entire universe. Now Dropbox wants to be my word processor. Next it wants to use AI to touch up my photos or whatever the hell because AI is the New Hot Thing tech companies must do to please Wall Street. I'm tired of closing modal boxes promoting a service I never asked for.
I stopped using Dropbox a long time ago (though switching cloud storage services is not trivial!). My point is a more general one, that today's tech companies can't just be, they must expand and expand.
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!
Yes, I’m also not their target customer for all those add on features that I don’t want… I would be using a different service if there was one with similar or better syncing capabilities that works as well as Dropbox…
Totally agree… I wish I could buy Dropbox’s minimal feature set: syncing files. And that they’d improve that feature rather than adding features I don’t use or want.
"you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem"
It’s a testament to the Unix philosophy that after all these years, Dropbox has grown and morphed into something that people no longer enjoy, and yet if you simply followed that advice years ago, you would still have a system today that works exactly as you intended, and in 50 years when Dropbox is long gone as a company, that system will still be working as built, and even after you die, that system can be inherited by your children and grandchildren and still work as well as it did on day one. This is the timeless way of building.
I wish I shared your optimism that any kind of server I set up in 2007 would still be fully functional today without any kind of maintenance, let alone that it will still be around to serve my grandchildren.
An FTP server already wouldn't serve my needs given that there's no such thing as mobile sync to an FTP server.
That's a fair criticism of the approach but I also think it's one of the strengths - protocols never change. So today with new requirements you'd need to figure out a new way to do it, but the old way still works, even if it doesn't meet your needs.
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.
what if i told you i know that, but i don't want to do the work or ongoing management of that myself. i just want somebody else to do it for me. for money that i pay them, and not for money that some VC or data broker pays them
Then I’d tell you I have a very particular set of skills, skills that could keep your files stored safely for a very long time. For money you would pay directly to me, in perpetuity.
I'll happily recommend https://syncthing.net/, it's open source, end to end encrypted, and peer to peer (your machines send files directly to each other).
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 :))
Syncthing supports transferring data via untrusted relays (used when two nodes cannot communicate directly) and also supports storing data encrypted on untrusted nodes (those nodes cannot decrypt the data)
I actually want a central server, because the main thing I'm worried about is a fire or flood taking out both my computers at once, in which case the sync to a central server works as a backup.
(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?)
Second this. I De-Googled/De-Dropboxed my life about 15 months ago with the help of Syncthing, and a third-party cloud backup provider (the '1' in my 3-2-1) strategy, and I haven't looked back.
As long as we stick with the economic incentives we have in quarterly stakeholder capitalism, it will forever be this way. You can’t fix it by appealing to people’s sense of bettering the world.
You aren't cynical enough. This incentive structure is what keeps us employed and our salaries going up and you should encourage it (assuming you're a laborer). If companies weren't doing this they'd hire to build a product with a minimal feature set and then layoff at a much larger rate once it was done.
In other words, encourage this mindset wherever possible, it's going to be what causes the next wave and spike in demand for SWEs.
Honestly there are just to many SWE then. FAANG just paid moonsalarys and lot of bad SWE joined the space who ofcourse never get to FAANG or only for 1 axed project but still are in the space not needed at all with I worked FAANG on cv. We can't all be SWE. The skilled will survive it no doubt.
Agreed. The field has become flooded w/ bad talent. I in large part blame leetcode hiring. Folks that are used to "cram cultures" just cram for that test but have zero idea how to engineer and architect good software and systems.
What if they had a little animated AI assistant that watched what you were doing and would say helpful things like “Hey! I see you’re writing a document, perhaps you should store that on Dropbox?” or “Hey! I see you’re making a meme, want to share that using Dropbox?”
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!
> 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.
I'm trying to spin up the lobsters software on a forum. It's meant to be a pseudo comment section for my blog, as well as a place to discuss anything that is intellectually stimulating.
It's so far in it's own butt that it thinks it's normal to go get 10M to raise money to build a hot dog/no hot dog AI app, or a crypto picture of a monkey.
I like playing this game where I count the amount of tech buzzwords per top comment in a post and try to guess before clicking on it to see how close I was.
We don’t really need to know their whole product strategy, I just can’t even come up with plausible uses for AI that meaningfully change the company enough to require a layoff. I disagree on tour last point, organizations that have data useful for bespoke models store it in aws/etc whereas organizations with random files that they need to share across teams use Dropbox.
There's a thing I saw on LessWrong a while ago where he says, "Before declaring a thing impossible, ask, 'Have you put 5 minutes on the clock and just brainstormed?'"
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?")
Even being able to train a personal model on the user’s handwriting to digitize the notes will be a big hit. I would love to have that. I’m this close to train my own Tessaract instance to do it.
And deliver it at a sufficiently better performance/utility to price ratio than Apple/Microsoft/Alphabet/Amazon/Meta can, and they might price it at zero.
You’re thinking about AI from a Dropbox customer POV.
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.
Those are great applications of AI. Still doesn’t explain about how DropBox canning 1/6th of the company will help them do that.
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.
> organizations that have data useful for bespoke models store it in aws/etc whereas organizations with random files that they need to share across teams use Dropbox.
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.
I can understand some of the skepticism, we JUST finished having every company try to pivot to blockchain and NFT and now it seems history is repeating with AI.
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.
Which shouldn't surprise anyone in an economic environment where the money fountain dried up. Every company is desperately chasing new revenue sources over growing their existing ones right now.
"Made some BS PR headlines, while not even having a clue how to do anything with those things, and surely not anything worth their customer's while" is an ever better description.
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
It's difficult for auto-tagging to add value in the presence of unrelated dealbreakers. Laying off people working on unsexy features does not inspire confidence that they have these priorities in order.
This isn't about photos, it's about walking before you run and Dropbox failing to walk, firing their physical therapist, and talking up their big plans to hire a running coach.
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").
Also maybe it sounds better to say "we are restructuring to move to the next cool thing" than saying "we are laying off because... you know... things aren't going that great right now"?
Blockchain still hasn't had a killer app that made people want to 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.
> Blockchain still hasn't had a killer app that made people want to use it. LLMs do.
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.
Bitcoin as "digital gold" that's easier to procure, store, move around, and split into pieces is clearly a "killer app". Gold has intrinsic value but it's market cap far exceeds that - it requires a "shared delusion" to accept that it's a store of value. I wouldn't say that Bitcoin as a store of value has society wide acceptance but 1T market cap is still very significant. I keep reading on hacker news that crypto bros lost all their money in the bubble that's now over, but the bitcoin I bought just 2 years ago is still way up. The real losers were the tech stocks I bought - maybe paying engineers 500k a year was the real bubble?
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.
Disclaimer: I think that we should not use blockchain (here we disagree), and I am not a big fan of generative AI (I think we kind of agree here).
> 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.
Blockchain and NFT brings no real value to most people.
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.
Good to know some parents still care and make an effort.
I realy dread the day all new juniors comming from uni will be AI/chatgpt users and lack in a lot of other important areas.
I'm pretty sure Google is already using plenty of "AI" behind these functionalities. Heck, image classification was the very beginning of the current "AI summer" a dozen years ago!
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.
Eh, I worked for a video analytics startup in 2016 and we had investors (and a CEO) who were desperately pushing to do stuff with AI because everyone was doing stuff with AI. Needless to say, the startup ended up alienating their customers and eventually failed and “exited” for a five figure sum.
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.
My take is that there has been an ongoing "AI/ML" hype cycle, but this latest craze is a more specific LLM hype. I expect to see a chatbot that can help you derive insights from everything you've uploaded.
For Dropbox, I predict that this will go exactly the way Dropbox Paper went.
"AI" (or whatever you want to call it) is real. I'm still on the fence around whether LLMs are as transformative--at least over the next few years--as some people think they are. But they're useful even in their current state.
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.
Having worked in this industry for two decades (and a Dropbox user since its public launch) the "product strategy" of most of these companies is close to just spitballing. If you want a recent example you can look at Facebook lighting almost $40 billion with their Metaverse product.
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.
I think Dropbox is, like a lot of companies right now, is struggling to find new revenue with new features added to their existing product lines and is divesting themselves of new work on mature products to focus on new markets. AI just being something exciting in general that has everyone hyped.
I would have thought HN would celebrate a company that's publicly decided to stop fucking with the Wi-Fi.
It won't! That's the most galling aspect of this gigantic waste of money. That you're calling it a "new market" is precisely the problem --- when you've sunk this many billions into something, you can't wait that long before needing to make that money back.
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.
>when you've sunk this many billions into something, you can't wait that long before needing to make that money back.
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.
The metaverse is their shot at the next OS (or platform, but that's too vague). He who controls the OS controls everything (Apple for their specific desktops, Microsoft for every other desktop and laptop, Apple and Google for mobile, Google for the web - yes, the web is for all intents and purposes another platform/OS).
Facebook has their own platform but it's built on top of others so it can be choked off. Facebook wants its own OS.
I'll add my 2c because I'm getting a little annoyed that folks who only have familiarity with Dropbox's consumer offering seem to think they have any idea what they're talking about.
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".
The AI doesn't need to be the end-all-be-all of defining permissions. But it's not hard to imagine a couple of areas where AI could help:
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."
You are exactly right. And to address the concerns about errors made by the machine, we are not looking in my organization to have the machine automatically make decisions on things like access. It would ideally warn us when we've likely done or are about to do something wrong. An auditing tool at least.
Needing strong AI to manage permissions on a file sharing program sounds like something out of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Like the sentient AI stuck operating an elevator.
Have you used Box? Dropbox offers editor and view levels with some additional options to add a password, set an expiration, download or not while Box is over here with 7 different sharing levels. I've managed Box environments and I've managed Dropbox ones and the amount of data leakage coming out of the Box environments was not only more often but much grander on scale because people kept picking the wrong level of access.
There are many good use cases for AI, however, permissions is not one of them. The current gen AI makes things up and would likely give a member of the cleaning staff super admin to allow them to clean the data.
People aren't arguing that AI alone makes all the permissions decisions. It's not hard to see a big leap from DLP solutions, which currently already make copious use of machine learning, to permissions auditing, monitoring and recommendations in the first place.
Seriously it’s embarrassing how leadership in many companies has ZERO vision for AI right now. Too focused on buying houses, drinking wine and riding horses. I think these people need to retire already.
Snark aside, this is something that's always kind of baffled me.
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.
Because no matter how many experiences you accrue or how much leisure you have, you're already dead on the geologic time scale.
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.
Yeah.. but do you think most ultra-rich elite are pushing against entropy or contributing more to it or at best staying neutral while further growing their wealth?
By actively working to make the world worse and increase the sum total of human suffering, à la Musk and Bezos?
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.
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.
A passion project I completely understand. What I don’t understand is what the vast majority of wealthy CEOs are doing: let’s get 5% more people to view our ads, let’s get people to spend 10% more on cheap disposable crap etc…
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.
> I have never had more fun than when solving problems, life without working on something interesting sounds insufferable to me.
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.
Unfortunately I think the answer to "why keep working if you're already rich beyond the dreams of avarice" is "because it means you can keep being ultra-rich and powerful and famous". All your material desires will be met regardless, but you won't get to feel as important if you stop working.
> 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.
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.
> If you want a recent example you can look at Facebook lighting almost $40 billion with their Metaverse product.
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.
> the "product strategy" of most of these companies is close to just spitballing
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’m genuinely surprised/impressed both Box and Dropbox still exist since they’re single-product-line pure plays, for enterprise only (no way do enough consumers pay for either to matter), and both are competing with what is either free or very cheap to bundle alternatives from MS and GOOG (and what company doesn’t have either 365 or G Suite already?? I know Dropbox tried to make its own office suite a few years back but I’ve never heard of anyone using it. So, it’s a testament to some amazing sales guys that they’re even alive.
I have a hard time believing you have serious experience working in a tech company anywhere near leadership.
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.
Super weird comment. I've worked at tech co's for ~15 years on sprint teams and directly next to the CTO and everywhere in between...and they've all had product strategies.
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 never said anything of the sort. DBX using AI might be a horrible flop. Nothing I said had anything to do with the [potential] success of their roadmap. Only that they have one (which, I guess, is only an assumption), and the OP doesn't know what it is but is commenting as though they do.
snark incoming - so you're saying that 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?
No, GP was just saying we should give Dropbox the benefit of the doubt, because Dropbox understands the product strategy more than any of us do. Including GP.
>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.
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.
> 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.
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.
I don't really understand what you are saying. That companies shouldn't have product roadmaps? That product roadmaps are mutually exclusive to sustainable growth or healthy profit? That companies using new tech are only doing so to prop up stock prices?
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
1. Just a strange take. Companies can do whatever they want. If they fail, they will fail. Companies are mere profit seeking machines. Perhaps you are thinking of non-profit orgs?
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.
>Just a strange take. Companies can do whatever they want.
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?
Saying your comment was cynical is not an ad-hominem. But regardless, it sounds like you've taken my comment and applied your desire for a complete alternative reality to it. Which, I guess.
Your message is you couldn't possible understand a public product strategy where they just released a press release explaining what they are trying to do?
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.
> Your message is you couldn't possible understand a public product strategy where they just released a press release explaining what they are trying to do?
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?
Yes, Dropbox's genius strategy is completely inscrutable by us mere mortals.
> 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?
Especially because they've already at least partially solved one of the big challenges: People already trust them with their data. As long as they do nothing to betray that trust (such as e.g. training models on the private data and making them accessible outside the organisation) they have a massive starting advantage over organisations that will need to convince customers that it's ok to upload sensitive information to somewhere new.
>DBX is sitting on a trove of data that is specifically well-suited for building bespoke, company specific AI models.
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.
Yea I don't understand all these responses. I'm not commenting on the quality or viability of DBX's AI strategy. Because I don't know what it is! I am commenting on the OP, who is acting like they know what it is.
> 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.
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.)
The difference is that you worked there. You knew the company. You knew the industry. You knew what the actual current strategy was!
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.
As a customer, I don’t care much what their strategy is as long as my file storage keeps working. I do care if the company that I’m using for file storage is going to start treating that as a ‘legacy’ business while they chase something unrelated in an attempt to expand their market, none of which helps me. Also, the hint that a service like this is even considering reading my stored data and training AI on that would be a huge red flag. Sounds like executives chasing investors at the expense of customers again.
>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.
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.
It's not invalid to ask whether companies are making real, strategic and well-thought moves or just jumping on a bandwagon.
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.
> 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.
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.
Wouldn’t you be in a shareholder meeting instead of a HN post? I mean, if you are a substantial shareholder, or this are only for private equity? Honest question.
Yeah I mean who else is going to extract all the data stored in customer drop boxes and feed it into a generative AI for drop boxes benefit? First you gotta fire everyone who sees a conflict of interest and a problem with invasively scraping all their customers private data entrusted with you.
> 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.
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.
> Dropbox moved beyond basic file sharing long ago.
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.
Good luck finding people with AI skills these days. Its seems possible that AI could be useful for accessing your files. Or having a chat using the files as expertise.
It's nothing more than fan service for Wall Street. They like hearing about cost-cutting measures and new hotness ("AI! GPT!"). It's just like slapping "blockchain" onto arbitrary things in 2018 to stim your valuation.
In the AI world, files will be created at a volume never before seen. Personal collections of files will matter less in this new limit. Dropbox probably sees the writing on the wall and may want to reconfigure itself to catch the upside.
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.
Not convinced this is because of investors. Investors want high returns on invested capital and these growth initiatives are often the opposite of that (see Meta's Metaverse play which investors hated). Executives want to empire build at the expense of both employee stability AND shareholder returns.
Not without regulation, and the US decided to do away with those for some reason.
It's just too much money to abuse your position in market A to pivot into market B.
Capitalism - regulation => utilities's entire point is to capture a monopoly to then abuse it.
Why would you need ai when you can just sort your files yourself, manually inspect your files for the one you want because normal search is inadequate...
Everyone is cutting off these days, however i have not seen any saying, we are cutting directord bones and cutting theier salaries. Any trie leader will do that
If it somehow be able to answer prompts like "show me the picture of Jeff from that trip we took 4 or 5 years ago" it might've been mildly useful. No idea whether worth the price of research tho
I mean, who knows, maybe they have a legitimate use for employees with skill in the ai field.
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.
- search your stuff using very fuzzy searches? Imagine looking up documents that are related to all your car purchases?
- image search based on a person's face, like google does
- build recommendations based on your documents, in general, just start using your documents to help you, in a privacy aware way, rather than just storing them.
It's probably best not to think of Dropbox the company as being about the product "Dropbox." It's a huge company and as with all megacorps their goal is to become bigger through whatever means they have at their disposal.
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 could see how it might be used as a "memory" to some of these AI-generated workflows. As content is generated, having it stored, indexed, and easily discoverable would be important. If the users of these AI tools are individuals and small groups more than big corporations, there may be a market here for Dropbox to tune its product line towards.
It's almost like companies are doing whatever the hype cycle demands. Two years ago it was all about having a huge headcount. Now it's about being "lean" but also "all in on AI". Smart engineers will take a 6 week bootcamp on ML and go right back to work.
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).
Something as simple as creating tags and summarys for documents, pipelining automatic PII handling are some features I could see being useful from the 28 seconds I spent thinking of applying AI to dropbox.
I imagine that leveraging AI to answer questions about documents, or helping with documentation composition, could be an expected feature by DropBox customers.
Dropbox has a problem that's been brewing for a while. As services like Photoshop, Office, and G Suite have moved entirely to the cloud, Dropbox's value proposition is less interesting. Even a decade ago, Box was beating them in the enterprise market. On the consumer side, cloud file storage is a freebie with offerings from Apple, MS, and Google.
I guess they have Paper, but last I used it, it felt like abandonware.
I thought Drew’s email was fairly poor written as these things go. Trying to Amp everyone on the future of AI for the company at this moment seemed odd.
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.
A Norwegian cloud storage company - JottaCloud - just released an AI-powered search engine[0] that lets you search all your stored images based on descriptions instead of meta data.
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.
I really don’t see how new ai capabilities lead to big layoffs and new opportunities for Dropbox.
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.
> requires a different mix of skill sets, particularly in AI
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?
I recently migrated from Dropbox to Google One. I find Dropbox's personal pricing really baffling: you get 2 GB for free or have to move all the way up to 2 TB and pay £100 a year. 100GB for £16 via Google is a much more sensible offer.
I’m thinking of doing the same, especially as the Dropbox app doesn’t sync on iPhone whereas google photos do. But Ive delayed the migration for years as its too much of a pain
I would recommend staying out simply because I trust google less with my primary data store backup than I do Dropbox. Especially with the risk of account locking.
This comes up all the time regarding Dropbox, why can't you pay less for a less-storage tier?
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.
Dropbox lost me years ago when they removed the 15GB or whatever limit I had with bonus space. I got the message about what they wanted and uninstalled when they started hounding me through app notifications to pay for extra space because I only had "__ MB" of space remaining.
Oh well, between Amazon syncing my photos as part of Prime and GDrive I have plenty of cloud storage for my needs.
Google One's tiers are better, but they're still kinda nonsense. The first 2 paid tiers are 100GB and 200GB which are fine. But then you have to jump up 3.5x the cost to 2TB. Why can't they just offer finely-tuned increments of 100GB? Or even 50GB or 25GB.
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.
Not really for Google Drive. I feel like they have too many enterprise customers using it to be able to just pull the rug on it. And Google Photos is essentially just a photo-specific UI for Drive.
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.
I never understand this kind of moralistic thinking about pricing. If you get more storage than you need for a price you're willing to pay you should be happy. You get the storage you need and then some.
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.
Those examples you gave are totally different. The service they're offering is renting out storage space on their servers. The most logical way to price that is to determine what dollar amount they want to charge to rent out X amount of space and just let me choose how many chunks of that I want to rent. It's not like when you pay for 2TB they physically reserve it for you like a plot of land. They're only actually giving you 2TB of storage space if you're using all of it.
For services like these, whether it's Google One or Dropbox, R&D is the major expense. Not hard drive space. In order to recoup the R&D cost you have to segment customers by their willingness to pay. When you charge per GB you leave a lot of money on the table.
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.
I mean I'm not arguing that I shouldn't have to pay. I just think the tiers and prices are bad.
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."
It’s pretty simple. Selling storage is a crap margin business. The provider makes no money on selling you those lower tiers. They only make money when you upgrade and buy more storage than what you use.
They don’t want to sell you a cheap commodity. They want to sell you convenience at higher margin.
> The provider makes no money on selling you those lower tiers.
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.
Yup - its 100 GB * 3 (well * 2.5 to 2.7 with erasure coding) + networking, power etc. etc. etc. Data is constantly being churned around as machines are serviced/die, disks are scrubbed for bit flips etc. and its not like you can put it on a tape on a shelf - the user expects it to be instantly accessible.
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.
This is what got me to get rid of Dropbox. Used them for free for a decade, and they pushed me out by limiting the number of clients. I looked for a paid option for $10-$20 per year since I basically only need a few GBs of space, but they don't have that. So figured I might as well move to my own Nextcloud instance. It's actually still free since I'm using Oracle Cloud's free tier, though of course there's my admin time, but I actually sort of enjoy that.
Have other companies been blaming the potentials of AI as a reason for the layoffs? GPT is impressive but it seems pretty early to cut 15% of your workforce because of it.
And yet I can't help but wonder what they need that many people for? The core of dropbox is still file syncing with extra tooling to enhance that. Figma had just over 200 people when they sold to Adobe and that is a pretty complex application.
Dropbox's revenue is about $2.5B/year. They want to grow too. You need a lot of people to support that. Sales, marketing, customer success, etc. It's not just the engineers who build and maintain the product. You cannot ignore revenue and growth potential when comparing head counts between companies.
> Having an enterprise product automatically increases headcount by 5x
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?
It does increase engineering headcount because you are expected to add a lot of features to your offering that end users wouldn't necessarily care about, like DLP, eDiscovery, audit logs, SCIM provisioning, admin controls, compliance with a hundred industry regulations (HIPAA, FINRA, SOX), key management, custom retention policies, data residency. The larger increase comes from the fact that large companies aren't using the checkout form on your website to buy the product, but expect a dedicated team to negotiate the contract and help with product rollouts and customization across their company.
> 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.
"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. We’ll need all hands on deck as machine intelligence gives us the tools to reimagine our existing businesses and invent new ones. And I'm committed to doing everything in my power to best position ourselves for the future and unlock our full potential."
What has AI got to do with me putting my files in the cloud so I can sync them across my devices?
Probably advanced Q&A chatbot trained on your company’s documents. Imagine how that could improve onboarding if you can ask AI how things work in your company.
Dropbox is a place where people put data. AI is built on data. A simple use case is something along the lines of, "Put all of your technical documentation in Folder X, then deploy Folder X as a Generative AI chatbot you can ask questions to".
I'd love to be able to ask questions about technical documentation, code bases, contract PDFs and so on, without having to worry to send my data unprotected to another company that doesn't have a Enterprise contract or can assure us of SOC 2 compliance.
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.
Do you think the ability to recall private information like that will more valuable to you, the user, or to data aggregators, advertisers, and service providers? Is there enough extra revenue in expanding services to Dropbox users, or will they inevitably become another data scraping company (perhaps with a veneer of "anonymization" to supposedly protect your privacy)?
As of now I trust Dropbox not to use my information or sell it to anyone else. In fact I pay them pretty penny not to. Is there any evidence that they’re violating that assumption?
> 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.
I can get my passport number by pressing the Windows key, typing "passport" and pressing Enter. I don't know if I'd want AI to come into the mix, or even Dropbox for that matter.
I believe nowadays most of Dropbox's revenue comes from their Dropbox Business customers. Or at the very least they see growth in business customer revenue as much more promising. (from my glancing over their SEC filings)
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.
It didn't read to me that they're laying people off because they think ChatGPT lets them need less employees, which is what most of the fearmongering (which may in time be justified) has been about A.I.
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.
So much bitterness and resentment around layoffs. Why? It's not personal, it's just business. Everyone got paid great money to do easy work, and the world is still full of opportunity.
Condolences to the affected Dropboxers. I think the silver lining for all of you is that amidst this turmoil, you're well positioned just by having Dropbox on your resume.
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.
Same here. I hate that my thinking has become so zero-sum, but after four months of this, the first thing I think now when I see another high-profile layoff is “great, more name-recognition resumes to consign mine to the trash.”
They gave the employees who were let go the opportunity to clean things up and talk to their coworkers. It's weird how in this age that's considered shocking, but kudos to Dropbox for at least doing it the right way.
About the AI thing (assuming it's true and not merely a convenient excuse for layoffs):
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.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 314 ms ] threadAnyway, good luck to the former Dropboxers, I hope they land on their feet.
So I wouldn't feel bad about having a "low" rank in deliberately selective sample of humanity.
Specially important since company was founded and grown to employ thousands of dropboxers without any money from finance gods.
They're just following the trend, or listening to the ridiculous demands of investors following the trend.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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
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
There's the free bingo space!
https://youtu.be/u48vYSLvKNQ
Which areas? Which employment category are they cutting? Hard to tell from the message.
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.
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
* 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.
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.
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.
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.
ChatGPT can come up with completely made-up answers that just seem right.
I describe AI as a new intern or assistant. Pretty useful, but don't bet your company on their answer.
You’d probably be better off using a different service if it bothers you so much.
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
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224
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.
https://m.slashdot.org/story/21026
>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 :))
With end-to-end encryption you can transfer data with an untrusted server as intermediary, which syncthing doesn't support.
(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?)
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.
In other words, encourage this mindset wherever possible, it's going to be what causes the next wave and spike in demand for SWEs.
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!
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.
I do agree with this observation of yours, fwiw.
If I succeed, do you want an invite?
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?
https://dropbox.gcs-web.com/node/10481/html
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?")
* find someone that will actually want to pay extra for their subscription on that.
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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35724939#35726399
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.
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.
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 really don't think there are many existing companies that "pivoted" to blockchain and NFT. Certainly not a majority.
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.
I have seen many companies announce that they would look into blockchain and NFT. Which is exactly what Dropbox is saying now for AI.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diem_(digital_currency)
https://about.fb.com/news/2022/05/introducing-digital-collec...
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...
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").
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
For Dropbox, I predict that this will go exactly the way Dropbox Paper went.
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.
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.
I would have thought HN would celebrate a company that's publicly decided to stop fucking with the Wi-Fi.
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.
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.
Facebook has their own platform but it's built on top of others so it can be choked off. Facebook wants its own OS.
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."
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35724939#35726399
> 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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Ooh betting on a failure? That is the easiest bet ever. If I bet on everything failing, I would win 99% of the time.
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'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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
> 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?
I have no idea what their strategy is. Neither do you. Neither does OP. That is all i said.
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!
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Can a utility just stay a utility?
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.
Only companies where owner is top boss can, sometimes. The moment boss has to answer to investors, growth is required.
Capitalism - regulation => utilities's entire point is to capture a monopoly to then abuse it.
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!
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.
Dropbox also never hired at a rate beyond their rate of revenue growth.
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).
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.
I guess they have Paper, but last I used it, it felt like abandonware.
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."
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 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.
combined with the biden depression, this makes it a good idea to fire employees and gain this new source of income.
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?
When you have less scale, you need to charge a bit more for your initial level.
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.
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 ?
Oh well, between Amazon syncing my photos as part of Prime and GDrive I have plenty of cloud storage for my needs.
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.
But I'd be fine with more reasonable increments in steps of X smaller amount of GB.
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.
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.
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."
They don’t want to sell you a cheap commodity. They want to sell you convenience at higher margin.
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.
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.
Seems like a poor excuse to cut people.
That's a much leaner headcount than what I would expect for a company with as large a market footprint as Dropbox.
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?
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.
What has AI got to do with me putting my files in the cloud so I can sync them across my devices?
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'.
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.
> 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.
There is no substitute for being organized.
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.
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.
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.
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.