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> 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 diff

• reportgunner 3y ago
  What if they make an AI that hallucinates something that looks like your file so they don't have to fetch it for you?
• arberx 3y ago
  Its bs.
  • mattbrewsbytes 3y ago
    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.
• Raed667 3y ago
  Maybe it is about search ? I could see value in using a chat-like interface with dropbox: > "Give me the budget for the R&D team from 2019"
  • never_inline 3y ago
    I can't see this being their moat though. Google and Microsoft can do much outcompete them with their storage SaaS products.
• jpalomaki 3y ago
  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.
• ignoramous 3y ago
  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.
  • bentt 3y ago
    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!
    • dspillett 3y ago
      > 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.
      • emdashcomma 3y ago
        This reminds me of the first 25 seconds of this clip from The Matrix: https://youtu.be/Smwrw4sNCxE https://youtu.be/Smwrw4sNCxE
  • thesimon 3y ago
    But how can you be certain that the answer is actually correct instead of just sounding correct? ChatGPT can come up with completely made-up answers that just seem right.
    • williamdclt 3y ago
• geodel 3y ago
  > use ai to store files better? 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!
  • jstarfish 3y ago
    Hopefully the AI would come in and shame you for storing tax returns in cloud storage.
• afavour 3y ago
  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.
  • PragmaticPulp 3y ago
    You’re not the target customer. A lot of people do use those tools, although most of them are outside of the tech world. You’d probably be better off using a different service if it bothers you so much.
    • bamboozled 3y ago
      We’ll I just realised I can use iCloud or Google drive for like 1/10th the cost of Dropbox ?
    • afavour 3y ago
      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!
      • oytis 3y ago
        > today's tech companies can't just be, they must expand and expand. 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.
      • rchaud 3y ago
• berkle4455 3y ago
  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?”
  • never_inline 3y ago
    This would be a great meme if they fired 16% people to make an chatgpt microsoft bob.
• rco8786 3y ago
  > 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.
  • fallat 3y ago
    The most real HN comment I've seen in years.
    • bamboozled 3y ago
      HN is becoming a meme, kind of like how HN used to write off Reddit.
      • westmeal 3y ago
        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.
      • aldarisbm 3y ago
        here come the elitists
      • DiggyJohnson 3y ago
        Off to lobste.rs then? I do agree with this observation of yours, fwiw.
        • citruscomputing 3y ago
          Have tried a few times, it's not my kind of place. Would appreciate other suggestions, though.
• PragmaticPulp 3y ago
  > 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.
  • mfer 3y ago
    > 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.
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• ape4 3y ago
  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.
• _jplc 3y ago
  I think their mindset is considering the "storing files" product "done" and doesn't need more features. 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)...
• teeray 3y ago
  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.
• lezojeda 3y ago
  [dead]
• echelon 3y ago
  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. Imagine selling Rolodex in the post-email era.
• pdntspa 3y ago
  Really tired of how everyone is always trying to take over the world. Can a utility just stay a utility?
  • dspillett 3y ago
    > 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.
  • ilyt 3y ago
    Not if company is publicly traded or has investors. Only companies where owner is top boss can, sometimes. The moment boss has to answer to investors, growth is required.
    • overrun11 3y ago
      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.
  • fcantournet 3y ago
    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.
  • nathants 3y ago
    shareholder primacy. it’s not the only strategy, but it is the most common.
• Hikikomori 3y ago
  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...
• spaceman_2020 3y ago
  AI is the perfect match for Dropbox. Search only finds relevant files. AI trained on my data can help me extract actual insights from the files.
• quijoteuniv 3y ago
  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
  • JustSomeNobody 3y ago
    They're too busy downvoting your comment to discuss ways to cut back themselves.
• ilyt 3y ago
  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
• maeln 3y ago
  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.
  • rchaud 3y ago
    > Happened with the dot-com bubble, web3, metaverse, cryptocurrencies, "BigData", ... CIOs love this one weird trick to boost shareholder value!
• flavius29663 3y ago
  - 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.
• samstave 3y ago
  It allows them to mine your data better... if you store anything on dropbox, its been catalogued and read.
• JeremyNT 3y ago
  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.
• mindtricks 3y ago
  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.
• phendrenad2 3y ago
  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.
  • rchaud 3y ago
    Two years ago, it was Dropbox thinking that people really needed a word processor, so they built "Dropbox Paper"
    • lawrenci 3y ago
      That was 7+ years ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dropbox_Paper https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dropbox_Paper Dropbox also never hired at a rate beyond their rate of revenue growth.
• chaxor 3y ago
  I imagine things like this are underway: https://github.com/jjuliano/aifiles https://github.com/jjuliano/aifiles 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).
• JustSomeNobody 3y ago
  > We’ve been bringing in great talent in these areas over the last couple years and we'll need even more. How many of the laid off "team" members could have been retrained?
• boredumb 3y ago
  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.
• onlyrealcuzzo 3y ago
  LoL - you won't need files in the future. ChatGPT will just generate your documents on the fly from prompts you memorize.
  • lostlogin 3y ago
    > 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.
    • onlyrealcuzzo 3y ago
      It was sarcasm
• ppeetteerr 3y ago
  I imagine that leveraging AI to answer questions about documents, or helping with documentation composition, could be an expected feature by DropBox customers.
• dehrmann 3y ago
  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.
• toddmorey 3y ago
  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.
• cronix 3y ago
  > I really don’t see how new ai capabilities lead to big layoffs and new opportunities for Dropbox. "Mr. Robot, categorize our customers in a monetizable way by inspecting the data they hold in their accounts."
  • nathants 3y ago
    this is a good argument for e2ee for a non technical audience.
• thatwasunusual 3y ago
  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. [0] https://docs.jottacloud.com/en/articles/7262803-ai-powered-photo-search https://docs.jottacloud.com/en/articles/7262803-ai-powered-p...
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• lisasays 3y ago
  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.
• lamp987 3y ago
  they will harvest your data with "AI" (everything is called AI today) and sell it to insurance companies. combined with the biden depression, this makes it a good idea to fire employees and gain this new source of income.
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• UncleOxidant 3y ago
  > 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?
• pricci 3y ago
  A box where I drop all my documents and then I can ask questions. Seems useful.