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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.

• rybosworld 3y ago
  > we JUST finished having every company try to pivot to blockchain and NFT I really don't think there are many existing companies that "pivoted" to blockchain and NFT. Certainly not a majority.
  • soneca 3y ago
    In case of NFT, I would round the number of companies that tried to pivot to it to zero. 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.
  • palata 3y ago
    "tried to pivot", that's very different. Maybe it should read "announcing that they would try to pivot", but you get the idea. I have seen many companies announce that they would look into blockchain and NFT. Which is exactly what Dropbox is saying now for AI.
    • Spivak 3y ago
      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.
    • ilyt 3y ago
      "Dipped their feet" might've been better description.
      • coldtea 3y ago
        "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.
  • nytesky 3y ago
    Well Meta tried to make its own crypto currency on the block chain. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diem_(digital_currency) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diem_(digital_currency)
    • kokanee 3y ago
      And they pivoted from that to instagram NFTs, which also failed. https://about.fb.com/news/2022/05/introducing-digital-collectibles-to-showcase-nfts-instagram/ https://about.fb.com/news/2022/05/introducing-digital-collec...
  • jonny_eh 3y ago
    I believe all of these are either dead or almost dead: https://www.washingtonpost.com/video-games/2023/01/04/square-enix-nfts/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/video-games/2023/01/04/square... https://decrypt.co/121872/ubisoft-rabbids-nfts-sandbox https://decrypt.co/121872/ubisoft-rabbids-nfts-sandbox https://vanguard-x.com/blockchain/nfts-are-coming-to-youtube/ https://vanguard-x.com/blockchain/nfts-are-coming-to-youtube...
• soco 3y ago
  You should call yourself lucky - I search in my Google Photos for something generic like "sunset" and I get 2 pictures if I'm lucky. No idea why... :(
  • qumpis 3y ago
    Maybe you need to keep objects centered when you take pictures :)
  • lowercased 3y ago
    Try "sunrise" instead.
• jjoonathan 3y ago
  Yes, but Dropbox Photos still: 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.
  • grepfru_it 3y ago
    What generates 80% of the revenue usually comes from 20% of the customers. What I’m trying to say is that those 20% DGAF about Dropbox photos.
    • jjoonathan 3y ago
      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.
  • dmix 3y ago
    > Laying off people working on unsexy features 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").
    • palata 3y ago
      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"?
• hbn 3y ago
  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.
  • palata 3y ago
    > 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.
  • ditonal 3y ago
    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. There's one last important point I want to make. Sites like Reddit and Hacker News and especially mainstream media are unduly influenced by big corporations. True blockchain use cases give power back to the individual. Sure, there's plenty of VC pump and dump shitcoins in crypto such as Solana and NEAR but the long term real utility is about the individual. Meanwhile, LLMs are almost exclusively trained and served by massive corporations, the same massive corporations that can influence the media you read. If a journalist wants to write an article about crypto energy usage, they'll write it. If they want to write about LLM energy usage, you have some of the richest, most powerful people in the world with some of the premier PR firms in the world who can influence that journalist and that publication in all sorts of ways. So critical stories about AI are more likely to get buried than critical stories about crypto. Keep that in mind. To me, the biggest difference between the AI hype and the crypto hype is that crypto had the skeptics and the critics in the room - as it should. But AI is badly, badly lacking those skeptics and critics.
• treeman79 3y ago
  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.
  • fHr 3y ago
    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.
• spi 3y ago
  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.
• stingraycharles 3y 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.
  • kokanee 3y ago
    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.
  • jonny_eh 3y ago
    The new hype is generative AI, sparked by image generators like Midjourney and large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT.
  • ghaff 3y ago
    "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.
• phpisthebest 3y ago
  They key to success will be AI driven block chain with machine learning crypto.