As a software developer, I'm anxious about the AI gold rush being a bubble that's about to pop.
I've been unemployed ever since the Great 15% Layoffs, about 14 months ago. I finally landed a job (well, once the paperwork is done) related to bringing up a new processor. But it's a DL accelerator.
I really hope there's not another employment bloodbath if/when the AI bubble bursts, since my savings are pretty much depleted.
VR winter and AI winter are two regular seasons in IT. Waste of money, nothing to show for it and a lot of devs surprised it did not work out this time.
That said, companies that deliver measurable value (literally, revenue/cost-impacting) to customers and have healthy free cash flow are going to weather winters.
No big breakthroughs; what we're seeing now is spare GPU power and memory (since those the only things still advancing significantly from year to year) brute forcing black box neural nets that nobody understands or can get to work right. If that's "AI", then me using ChatGPT to write my essay is "doing my English homework".
This type of unbridled pessimism baffles me. If you think what had happened over the past, say, 24 months is "AI Winter", I can't imagine what your bar for AI Summer is.
Honestly if you can I would try to find something outside "AI" for now: even if you are doing real deep learning stuff the reality is that 99% of the people investing in AI at the moment can't differentiate obvious bs from real R&D at all, they are here just because of the hype and are throwing millions to anything with an AI tag on it, so when this bubble pops it will be ugly for everybody, indiscriminately. This is another dot com.
I'm not unemployed, but I too am worried about this. Practically everything besides big tech has been in a recessionary state for awhile now but the S&P looks great because nvidia's stock went to the moon and a few other tech companies are doing very well... for now. I'm not sure how much longer this can be sustained.
Directly from the linked article: "On average, first quarter 2024 earnings results were solid. Four sectors — Communication Services, Utilities, Consumer Discretionary and Information Technology — generated the strongest earnings growth for the quarter"
But that was just a link I came across quickly. You can look at almost any economic statistics you want and see that the economy (at least in the US, you mentioned the S&P 500 so I assume you are US-based) is quite strong right now.
Average != Median and that is what the commenter above mentioned.
The S&P500 and others don't remove the outliers going to the moon which is good for investors but as a data metric would make for a pretty large deviation.
S&P must mean something different where you're from, because when I looked as recently as this morning this is not true. I'm worried for the exact opposite reason: everything is up, across sectors most not technology and definitely not AI. Everyone's waiting for inflation to decrease and trigger corresponding interest rate declines so they can resume the consumption frenzy. We learned nothing; that's what I think is scary.
I don't think so. People already start to realize that AI won't solve everything in the near future and will hire soon also more engineers again, when the bubble bursts engineers will be valued better again and more jobs should open
If the DL Accelerator has a decent Fed Sales muscle and/or you are working on features that are truly critical for the business (as in $$$ making features) you will be fine.
A lot of the 15% bloodbath was also because of severe overhiring during Covid's 0% interest rate times, so AOPs needed to be reworked for a high interest rate period.
It's not so bad to get caught flat-footed by something like ChatGPT (of course, it's not like Google didn't have AI stuff in development, for example that thing they showed once and then never brought up again when you could let Google Now talk to call reps), after all it seems like everyone was genuinely caught off guard by that first release of GPT and it's capabilities as a product.
The bigger issue for Google, at least in my view, seems to be that they don't seem capable of responding or competing in a real tangible way. Over the years they've seemingly lost the ability to rapidly and coherently release a product. Instead, you get this bizarre, incoherent, and spasmodic, response from all of these different product teams that don't seem to really work together all that well and don't have a clear product identity.
At this point, I doubt Google can turn the ship around. The company is just a gigantic behemoth of petty fiefdoms that will go the way of the Carolingian empire.
My totally uninformed outsider view is that Google lacks leadership that can set a direction and follow through with it. They're no longer capable or interested in shaking up the environment like they did with Gmail. I understand that Google is a large mature company now, but they also seem to be uninterested in steady-handed long-term maintenance of a lot of their products either.
I don't see any vision in Google's products other than "ad money printer go brrrr."
As has been said, a company's products end up mirroring its internal org/cooperation structure.
By that metric, measured against Google's recent product releases, Google's org/cooperation structure is broken.
It's tired to reiterate the 'launch and abandon product for promotion' incentives, but it also seems to go higher up.
Individual teams at Google are amazing, and build amazing features, but the company as a whole whole seems incapable of knitting those features together into a coherent product.
I worked with great developers at Google during my short stint there (part of the Jan 23 layoffs) but the management structure gets so thick and tangled once you get above feature teams.
> At this point, I doubt Google can turn the ship around. The company is just a gigantic behemoth of petty fiefdoms that will go the way of the Carolingian empire.
Microsoft was in a bad shape too but they did turn the ship around when Ballmer left. Not sure whether MS was better entrenched than Google is but what seems to me is that Google need a drastic leadership change. Or they could be milking whatever they have and eventually go the way of the dodo.
> Some of you may remember Google's much-hyped AI voice "Duplex," which was supposed to automate all those annoying phone calls and call centers. That was in 2018, six years ago. Since then, we've seen how it's turned out
Reasonably successfully?
Call screen is easily one of the best features of my phone. Call hold navigation is also really useful. It calling restaurants and the like is not something I commonly use but it works and I've used it sometimes.
Yeah, I'm not sure if people have become so reactionary when it comes to unsupported tech-land hype, but on the flip side I find this unwarranted pessimism almost as annoying.
The call features on my Pixel are amazing IMO, and new ones (like the one that warns you if you are being scammed) could be great for large swaths of people.
Many companies are trying to find new growth to satisfy their shareholders. We all understand that growing growth is unsustainable, but that doesn't matter, they just 'have to'.
VR and Crypto/Blockchain didn't pan out, so now the new hotness is AI. There is an opportunity to make something useful out of AI that people want to pay for, in order to keep shareholders happy.
AI is especially interesting for shareholders as it allows you to cut down on labour cost for certain professions. It's an almost ideal tool for creating shareholder value.
Yet, I think the hype will come crashing down eventually. Because we know that it's all statistics and no actual reasoning. Cool that your service now has new AI features that tells me things, but why would I believe any of it?
Meanwhile, I'm pondering what the next hype will be. Not VR for sure. 'Normal' people don't want to wear heavy stuff on their head messing up their hair. Fun for games but let's be real.
But I have absolutely no sense of direction where things are headed, if there even is such notion. What I do observe is that society is more diverging between the haves and the have-nots.
I expect things will be cyclical, and one day someone will have a product that touts "without any AI!" Suddenly, they'll be a threat to the Googles and Apples that only know how to do AI at that point.
> Google's goal, according to Jenson, is to create a Jarvis-like assistant that keeps users locked into Google's ecosystem. The company is driven by the fear that someone else might get there first...
> ...Apple is pursuing a similar AI lock-in strategy with Siri, Jenson believes.
I remember when Microsoft got sued for including a web browser in Windows. Oh how anti-trust has fallen.
> I remember when Microsoft got sued for including a web browser in Windows. Oh how anti-trust has fallen.
The case was more complicated than you’re suggesting, and a lot less relevant.
Which of these companies are you suggesting has the monopoly position in the phone market? Apple? Google?
Which other OS-level AI voice assistants are being prevented from competing in this case? This isn’t like a web browser download where the marginal cost is negligible download bandwidth. Voice assistants are expensive to develop and run. They’re investments made in the product being sold.
Most importantly: What outcome do you even want? That the government forbid companies from developing AI integration into their own platforms because it might make people more loyal to those platforms?
The same panic is happening on the adoption side where managers want to be seen keeping up with the latest tech. They are spending money of haphazardly executed OpenAI API integrations without understanding how they work Every business and gov org I speak to these days is working on an "AI policy".
I'm not convinced A.I. will disappear anytime soon, either. It's way too useful, even if it's wrong sometimes.
Just in my personal life:
GitHub Co-Pilot: I love this tool and really don't like working without it. Is it perfect? No. Does it make mistakes? Yes. But I think of it as having a full-time junior developer working under me. They can take care of a LOT of the boilerplate crap while I focus on the more difficult parts of programming.
GPT4: Has replaced most of my internet searches. It's so easy to ask it focused questions and get a reasonable answer, or, a starting point for more in-depth research.
Kagi's Summarizer: I like being informed on world events, but, every news org likes to write 9000 page articles for the most mundane things. With Summarizer, I can, get a nice bullet-pointed list of facts without all the fluff. In turn, I can get through much more news quickly.
Apple Photos: I use A.I. recognition of various objects and the ability to search for them almost daily.
Grammarly: It prevents me from sounding like the absolute idiot I am in online conversations.
I'm very eager for A.I. stuff to be integrated into more tools, such as my file manager. How amazing it would be if I could just point an A.I. system at a directory and say something along the lines of "Please organize this using Johnny.Decimal." or "Please find all documents related to my financials."
At the other end of the spectrum there's Microsoft's marketing dominated approach, which is busy renaming everything they own into some variant of Copilot.
What is the moat for AI? Right now, it's enormously expensive to produce an LLM but doesn't AI produce results which, in the long run, will make it easier and easier for any company to produce the same?
For Google? Efficient datacenters, TPUs/GPUs, institutional knowledge, robust crawling infrastructure, gargantuan proprietary data sets, existing partnerships, large catalog of products that can absorb the functionality of competitors products as a feature, etc.
I question how useful "jarvis" would be for most people (including me).
I was in the fortunate position to have a supremely talented admin/chief of staff a couple years ago when I was in charge of a 100+ people org. They were amazing. Spoke 5 languages, took detailed notes for me, created decks and ran status update meetings on my behalf, scheduled my time based on my priorities. Ultimately, it was nice to have, because when they left, I never ended up replacing them.
The only thing I really missed was scheduling meetings. But now a calendly link works just as well.
I disagree with the article. I think Google is right to freak out. And I don't see how they are going to deal with it with their sick culture and hierarchy.
I think Meta is doing much better. They are not freaking out, instead they are hyper-focusing on winning the race and then see how can they use that to improve. They have a lot less nonsense. I have no idea how they are going to monetize this huge expense, but I would bet they are going to be fine. (who would've thought only a couple of years ago)
It could have been a nice opportunity to set a very tangible common goal, and work towards it. But firing people, reshuffling everyone and then forcing AI onto everying doesn't sound like something that would unite employees.
I absolutely believe this. The spouse works at a very large multinational working in B2B (exclusive) software. Their AI products have taken years to develop stretching years before the pandemic. Rushing useful AI out the door is a recipe for subpar products/services.
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They didn't miss on social media from a social perspective -- Google+ was a great user experience. But it did make it harder to harvest people's attention for ad revenue.
They... didn't, tho. They failed in their attempts to make a Facebook clone (and a Twitter clone, actually; see Google Buzz), but Youtube was very successful.
I don't think I blame Google for panic here. I find myself going to claude.ai much more, and Google somewhat less. Claude feels much more efficient to me than filtering through search results for many queries. The conversational aspect can be really helpful also.
He posted this on LinkedIn: “ I just left Google last month. The "AI Projects" I was working on were poorly motivated and driven by this panic that as long as it had "AI" in it, it would be great. This myopia is NOT something driven by a user need. It is a stone cold panic that they are getting left behind.
The vision is that there will be a Tony Stark like Jarvis assistant in your phone that locks you into their ecosystem so hard that you'll never leave. That vision is pure catnip. The fear is that they can't afford to let someone else get there first.
This exact thing happened 13 years ago with Google+ (I was there for that fiasco as well). That was a similar reaction but to Facebook.
BTW, Apple is no different. They too are trying to create this AI lock-in with Siri. When the emperor, eventually, has no clothes, they'll be lapped by someone thinking bigger.
I'm not a luddite, there is some value to this new technology. It's just not well motivated.
Edit: Well, this has blown up. To be very clear, I wasn't a senior leader at Google, my projects were fairly limited. My comment comes more from a general frustration of the entire industry and it's approach to AI”
On the other hand, access to enterprise and personal context is key.
From that perspective, Google (Android, Maps, Drive/Calendar/Photos/Gmail), Apple (iOS, Maps, iCloud/Calendar/Photos/Mail), and Microsoft (Office, AAD/Windows, GitHub, XBox) all look solid.
Even if they screw up initial efforts.
Those data streams aren't something you can create out of thin air, without first creating products and attracting users.
AI assistants are only as smart/dumb as their context.
This is not only Google. Most of the big and medium tech companies CEOs have been about as gullible and delusional as the crypto-bros of 2k18.
And now, as all the FOMO-driven AI integrations are starting to bear fruits, it seems that we're going to enter a chapter of unprecedented bullshit and disappointment in the history of personal computers.
You're reminding me of the takes in the original dot-com bubble — which was indeed a bubble, don't get me wrong — all the nay-sayers 24 years ago asking why anyone would want to shop or bank online, missing that it was easy, fast, cheap, convenient, and sufficiently good.
Of course, just a lot of companies went under when that bubble collapsed, and there's no guarantee that any of the current AI players will make the right move this time either.
Even a ton of non-tech companies are rushing to retool their data systems and pipelines so they can ask AI trivial questions about their business. It’s crazy, but CEOs love the demos. The number of graphs and dashboards they could have had manually-created for the same money… good thing they’re all super-good at business and don’t just chase whatever fad comes along.
Will there, though? Or will it just to be those big companies with important, entrenched products making them worse and worse and due to some combination of network effects, entrenchedness in industry, and financial/technical lock-in people will be unable to choose a competitor?
Mmm I don't think I agree with this person's analysis, despite him being a ex-googler.
Don't get me wrong - i'm also not a big fan of company's hamfisting "ai" into every product that they have. But in Google's case it might be a do-or-die situation.
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Basically, AI tech's current value proposition is simple - information retrieval.
What does Google happen to do? Information retrieval.
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Google absolutely should be scared if they aren't already.
The phrase "Just ask ChatGPT" has already entered the common parlance, in much the same way "Just Google It" did in the 2000s. Zoom killed Skype in much the same way.
In 10 years, gen-alphas could be using ChatGPT exclusively for performing their information gathering.
In 20 years, Google's search revenue (55% of their revenue) might be hit sufficiently that they have to pivot something else.
In 30 years, more time than it took Yahoo to become completely irrelevant as a company (founded 30 years ago!), Google may be just as irrelevant then.
Google is already giving up the meta-physical space to Facebook and Apple. They've already given up the services space to Apple. They hardly even build their own hardware anymore, so all that's all going to Apple and Samsung. If the balance of power shifts, Google might just lose Android to Samsung completely.
Now they might just lose the information-retrieval space too, which is their core identity.
What do they have left after? YouTube, Business, and Infra, and Play Store. None of which actually makes them much money at all.
They absolutely need to put their AI thing in as many things as possible, and try to leapfrog the competition. But at this point I think they may have already lost in the current consumer headspace.
I've been unemployed ever since the Great 15% Layoffs, about 14 months ago. I finally landed a job (well, once the paperwork is done) related to bringing up a new processor. But it's a DL accelerator.
I really hope there's not another employment bloodbath if/when the AI bubble bursts, since my savings are pretty much depleted.