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I don’t know who said it, but an amazing quote I love is: “they call it AI until it starts working, see autocomplete” I love this because when a company tells
by RandomWorker 3y ago
I don’t know who said it, but an amazing quote I love is: “they call it AI until it starts working, see autocomplete”
I love this because when a company tells me they do AI (as a software engineer) they tacitly say that they have little to no knowledge of where they want to go or what services they will be offering with that AI.
- meowface 3y agoVaguely reminds me of this Steve Jobs quote (whether or not one agrees with him) when he met the Dropbox team: "you have a feature, not a product".
- toomuchtodo 3y agoDropbox laughing in that $10B market cap and $2B+ ARR. Jobs was right about the concept (insert meme about Apple ecosystem devs realizing their product was killed by an Apple feature release), but wrong in that specific instance.
- throwaway290 3y agoDropbox was losing money every year of its existence until 2021.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- cowsup 3y agoBy design. If I gave you $250,000,000 to grow a company, and then next year I saw you had $250,050,000 in the bank, then $250,102,000 next year, and so on, I'd be pretty annoyed that I backed you. You have so much money you could be spending on hiring, development, and marketing, and you're instead just slowly chugging along, padding the corporate bank account? What am I paying you for?! Give me my money back. VC-backed companies that spend more than they earn aren't duds. It's the nature of VC-backed corporations.
- throwaway290 3y agoThey spent it all on storage and on their new spammy looking marketing emails that pester free users to upgrade I guess. I don't recall something really new on Dropbox since they were established.
- toomuchtodo 3y agoI am paying Dropbox for storage and will pay them until I die. Rock solid sync and object durability, API access to my storage for my apps, no complaints whatsoever. I don't want new, I want storage I don't have to think about.
- xwdv 3y agoUntil they die, relatively soon. 100 years from now Dropbox will be a distant memory, but locally mounted FTP directories under version control will be alive and well.
- toomuchtodo 3y ago> but locally mounted FTP directories under version control will be alive and well. [1] [2] This might matter to you, but it does not matter to me. In the meantime, my life will have been better and my time saved between now and death (certainly less than 100 years from now). That's what the money is for. Time is non renewable. If you have more time and ideology than money, I admit your solution is a better fit for your life and use case(s). Self host if you want, I have better things to do personally vs cobbling together technology that I can buy polished for the cost of two coffees a month. There's a product lesson in this subthread. No business lasts forever, the benefit is the value delivered during its lifecycle. Provide value, and I will happily let you ding my credit card monthly or annually (please support annual plans B2C!) forever. "Build something people want" or something like that [3]. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863 ("My YC app: Dropbox - Throw away your USB drive ") [3] https://www.ycombinator.com/library/4D-yc-s-essential-startup-advice#the-pocket-guide-of-essential-yc-advice https://www.ycombinator.com/library/4D-yc-s-essential-startu... (sharing perspective as an educational exercise, nothing more, nothing less)
- aoeusnth1 3y agoThe goal is not to make money for the most years in a row.
- viridian 3y agoSo was almost every unicorn startup. They purposefully aim for growth until its unsustainable, then switch over to exploiting their market position. We may not like it, but the business model is far from novel or unexpected.
- jjoonathan 3y agoIt's a quality zinger, but ironically the product may have been a subset of the feature: I'd argue the product is the fact that Dropbox doesn't belong to a platform vendor and therefore can't be leveraged for anticompetitive purposes / lock-in.
- makeitdouble 3y agoThis quote always struck me as a weird anti competitive flex, in the "we can crush you anytime" way. And Apple later released the whole iCloud suite that made Dropbox a second class citizen in the OS, even as to this day Dropbox works better than iCloud in many ways. We more and more hear the "services revenue" drum at every Apple earning call, so Jobs was not wrong either.
- brookst 3y agoWhen someone says they “do middleware” or “do massively concurrent data stores”, does the same observation apply?
- brudgers 3y agoI don't know exactly where on HN I read it but it was "Artificial Intelligence is an ideology, not a technology." So I am wary of the means justification that AI projects entail. YMMV.
- tivert 3y ago> I don't know exactly where on HN I read it but it was "Artificial Intelligence is an ideology, not a technology." What is this? https://www.wired.com/story/opinion-ai-is-an-ideology-not-a-technology/ https://www.wired.com/story/opinion-ai-is-an-ideology-not-a-... That's a fantastic observation. I'd even hazard to say that for some Artificial Intelligence is closer to a religion, not just an ideology.
- potatolicious 3y agoAs someone who works in the field and works with LLMs on the daily - I feel like there are two camps at play. The field is bimodally distributed: - AI as understandable tool that power concrete products. There's already tons of this on the market - autocorrect, car crash detection, heart arrythmia identification, driving a car, searching inside photos, etc. This crowd tends to be much quieter and occupy little of the public imagination. - AI as religion. These are the Singularity folks, the Roko's Basilisk folks. This camp regards the current/imminent practical applications of AI as almost a distraction from the true goal: the birth of a Machine-God. Opinions are mixed about whether or not the Machine-God is Good or Bad, but they share the belief that the birth of Machine-God is imminent. I'm being a bit uncharitable here since as someone who firmly belongs in the first camp I have so little patience for people in the second camp. Especially because half of the second camp was hawking monkey JPEGs 18 months ago.
- brudgers 3y agoAI as understandable tool that power concrete products. This why my wariness. Contemporary AI stands upon mechanical turks. In contrast spellcheckers, checkers engines, and A* were built solely by people with employer provided health insurance. In the old days, the hard work for professional pay was the justified means. Today, taking advantage of the economically desperate is the justified means. There’s no career path from mechanical turk to Amazon management because mechanical turk is not an Amazon position. It’s not even employment. No minimum wage. No benefits. No due process. Just eggs that gotta be cracked.
- pastacacioepepe 3y agoI've had to deal with this kind of company in FOMO mode. They start from a solution (AI) in search of a problem to solve, while the ideal approach would be the inverse. Pretty much a guarantee that a lot of money will be wasted while panickly iterating through pointless approaches. I figure this happens every time a new fundamental technology comes out, the dot-com bubble has probably seen many such companies.
- mistrial9 3y agomore money is being printed than ever before.. some people literally have to find something to do with it.. the waste in AI marketing is one result. AI in the digital age is uniquely disruptive however, since it connects directly to the way we communicate.. so there is some reason to be wound-up by this, whatever role you are in
- getoffmycase 3y agoStarting from a problem and making a solution requires that you understand both your problem domain and the domain of the solution very well. Much harder than taking a hammer and hitting everything that kind of looks like a nail
- tomrod 3y agoThis is a beautiful way to frame it. My consulting company works with folks to take ideas that are solvable or usable with an ML framework and map those to digital services or solutions. Rarely is the end product called "<something> AI" -- but at the end, it's still using AI/ML. We've been around a bit longer than the current AI hype, and our niche is engaging and fun.
- DebtDeflation 3y agoRight, and not just autocomplete. The same is true of speech to text, language translation, image classification, object detection, etc.
- madrox 3y agoThis is the AI Effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect It was coined by John McCarthy, one of the founders of the term AI.
- ShamelessC 3y ago> “they call it AI until it starts working, see autocomplete” No disrespect, but this is a pretty bad quote. Are we really at the point where a lazy tweet not-so-hot-take deserves to be stored in the annals of history?
- marcinzm 3y agoMy college textbook on AI from 20 years back considered a large enough set of if-else statements (ie: an expert system) as rudimentary AI. Now we'd call it a bunch of hard coded if-else statements but 40 years ago it was state of the art AI and 20 years ago it was worth including in a textbook.
- tsumnia 3y agoNorvig and Russell's textbook (one of the current go-to AI books) calls the big "if-else AI" a "simple reflex agent". It observes the environment in a rudimentary way and then goes through the if-then chain. One of the first things students (should) learn is how inefficient this is for more challenging problems. My students were just given an assignment where they build AI to play Connect 4. Some will try to make a simple reflex solution because they want to avoid recursion, then come to office hours asking how to make it work better. It... can't. There really is an observable upper-bound on if-then performance.
- jononor 3y agoMeanwhile decision tree ensembles are still one of the most performant models for tabular data, with gradient boosted trees particularly hard to beat.
- TeMPOraL 3y ago> There really is an observable upper-bound on if-then performance. Only on if-else chains you can code by hand. There's a lot of machine learning methods that can be seen as using data to generate large networks of if-else decision points. There are methods that perform (a discrete simulation of) continuous generalization of if-else chains. And fundamentally, if-else chains with a loop thrown in the mix is a Turing-complete system, so it can do anything. The problem here is that if-else chains are a really inefficient way for humans to model reality with. We can do much better with different approaches and abstractions, but since they all are equivalent to a finite sequence of if-else branches, it's not the if-else where the problem is - it's our own cognitive capacity.
- 3y ago