6 ms·

Does anyone else feel embarrassed when they read statements like this? No goals. No vision. Just 'AI everywhere!'

drewcoo 2y ago
That's always been "pivot," the "strategic" hail Mary play . . . just now with AI!
ohthatsnotright 2y ago
Well, maybe we'll get good recommendations on the type of glue to put in our pizza sauce with the new hard-hitting pieces sure to come out of WaPo.
hnthrowaway0328 2y ago
They are just chasing winds. You can clearly see that there are two kinds of CEOs, the ones that bring the wind such as Huang, and others who chase. Unfortunately the later also gets paid big bucks and busy putting golden parachutes on themselves. I'd argue that it's better to not have a CEO than having one of those.
- VHRanger 2y ago
  Note that Huang was the founder of Nvidia - he's not a naked ladder climber like Pichai or Krzanich at Intel previously. Huang made good moves with CUDA, being early on tensor cores by being forward looking. That said, Nvidia is selling the shovels here, it's easy to look good. Some companies have a real usecase for generative AI, but it's something like 5% of these stories. The rest is CEOs FOMOing
  - b112 2y ago
    I think not a CEO FOMO on AI, but the share price FOMO. Announce AI? Potential share spike, or a counter to a dip. For example "poor earnings at The Post!", vs "We're shifting to AI!"
- marcinzm 2y ago
  The goal of the CEO is to drive the stock price up in whatever horizon investors care about. Usually it's not a long horizon. It's not to build a sustainable product or even a product at all.
  - hnthrowaway0328 2y ago
    Many CEOs can't even do that properly. Check out Unity as a shiny example and they still get fat paycheck. In fact they gave themselves nice raises too if you check the SEC docs. Ironic, isn't it?
- verisimi 2y ago
  How about an AI CEO?!! It too would be a good cost cutting measure!
  - hnthrowaway0328 2y ago
    I actually think an AI CEO is way better than the average one.
pjc50 2y ago
The goal is firing all the staff.
- gedy 2y ago
  Yes and to appear "innovative" doing so, since it's "because of AI" and not that they are going broke.
nicklecompte 2y ago
“After six months of investigation and $15m in consulting fees, we have determined that our crossword designer can easily be replaced with advanced AI.” [two days later] “Okay, a songbird known for its imitation abilities, starts with ‘r’, ‘twe’ in the middle... wait what, Rottweiler?????”
wslh 2y ago
No, AI is one thing today and another thing tomorrow but the trend is unstoppable. Clearly we need to understand the boundaries where AI is just "hallucination" but it is right here right now and evolving. Zillions of startups are doing AI now, most will died but some will survive in this collective experiments. Also, there was a time in HN when people argued before downvoting.
- thejohnconway 2y ago
  Or will it be like self-driving cars? Early gains, but then a long plateau? AI is just not at the stage where outfits like the WP should be "pivoting" to it (whatever that means). I suspect it just means producing more "content" with fewer people, and the result will be garbage. Journalism doesn't need more content-filler type articles.
- rsynnott 2y ago
  > No, AI is one thing today and another thing tomorrow but the trend is unstoppable. [..] Zillions of startups are doing AI now, most will died but some will survive in this collective experiments. Substitute 'Blockchain' for 'AI' and this is a comment from 2016 or so. Not to say that one can predict the doom of 'AI' on that basis, but lots of VC money being ploughed into a thing does not necessarily mean that the thing will become a Thing.
  - pheatherlite 2y ago
    Block chain was easy to avoid. Yes the hysteria was the same, but the foundational and fundamental shifts in how the common person does something has changed for many. I've noticed with my own 'non techie' family members who have started using various integrations of LLM and less Google. An impact of something on society at large can usually be measured by how it is used by the youth of today. Chatgpt started by aiding kids in their assignments, but now many depend on it for answers to various non academic questions. Whereas Block chain was not part of an average 5th grader's daily computer usage.
  - wslh 2y ago
    I have companies in Blockchain, and in AI, and in Cybersecurity and can say that it is not the same. Blockchain never delivered for most people. For example, blockchain promised banks for the unbanked and the unbanked now use PSPs with mobile phone apps but not crypto. AI is delivering... I wonder why I need to explain this. In the dot com era there were a lot of hype about Internet... few consumers, then... kids don't know what Internet is while using mobile phone apps.
philjohn 2y ago
It was ever thus - remember when everything was about "The Cloud"? TheOnion satirical news report about HP adopting "That cloud thing that everyone is talking about" is still relevant 11 years later: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ntPxdWAWq8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ntPxdWAWq8
- Tenoke 2y ago
  In all fairness, most things did move to the cloud.
  - danielbln 2y ago
    Yep, I remember the comments back in the day: "it's just someone else's datacenter", "that's maybe for startups, no bigger corp worth their name will give their infrastructure to some third party". Fast forward to today, the vast majority of our clients (Germany) have their infra in Azure, the rest uses AWS with GCP being a distant third. Apart from some GPU boxes for LLM tests, none of our clients have any non-cloud/local hardware/DCs anymore.
    - littlestymaar 2y ago
      And the most interesting part is that it's still an irrational thing, everybody moved towards it, lost money in the process, but they did it nonetheless. Amazon, Microsoft and Google won big at the expense of pretty much everybody else. And that's exactly what they hope they can achieve again with AI…
      - zztop44 2y ago
        I’ve definitely benefited from having practically infinite computing power be just one API call (and credit card bill) away. I remember before AWS and provisioning computing resources was way more time consuming and annoying.
        soco 2y ago
seydor 2y ago
Either you get on board or you get under it
JSDevOps 2y ago
It's just so cringe, No one has a clue what it means in real terms just put AI on "it" and hope for the best. i.e Hope we get some of that cash from somewhere.
- fullshark 2y ago
  It means "stop paying all these reporters and cut our costs cause we lost 77 million last year."
theeandthy 2y ago
And anxious I suppose. Journalism should be synonymous with “people” and healthy society. AI and journalism is going to yield one giant ball of misinformation. I would love to say “we need more printed papers” like the good ‘ol days, but people don’t much have the patience to read by and large. To be honest, at one time I was worried about the young generation and devices. But I’m starting to see older family members are getting plugged into the algorithm.
- b112 2y ago
  Journalism should be synonymous with “people” People based journalism in 2030: "AI seems to be exhibiting AGI characteristics, experts concerned" AI based: "Recent solar activity may cause unusual AI behaviour, nothing to be concerned about"
rsynnott 2y ago
It's late-stage tech bubble stuff; compare the period when people were trying to shoehorn Our Lord and Saviour the Blockchain into everything. The goal shifts from "we should use Buzzword where it is useful" to "we should use Buzzword so that we are using Buzzword".
raxxorraxor 2y ago
I believe we will get a lot more "industrially manufactured" stories. Just pay for API access to reuters or another press agency and let the AI rewrite the content and push it on your news site ready to be consumed. Content is wrongly summarized? I doubt in the news economy this hardly matters anymore.
tcgv 2y ago
"Pivot to AI" is a strategy. A desperate one nonetheless. From the article, this strategy is being announced to achieve a business goal: > the newspaper will be looking for ways to use AI in its reporting as it seeks to recoup some of the $77 million it lost last year. A company's vision/mission are higher-level determinations, almost like their "constitution"; everything below (goals, strategy, objectives, plans) should be defined in alignment with it. Here you can find WaPo's mission statement: - https://www.washingtonpost.com/about-the-post/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/about-the-post/
xnx 2y ago
We'll know it's full hype when Long Island Iced Tea Corp. changes its name to Long AIsland Iced Tea Corp.

That's always been "pivot," the "strategic" hail Mary play . . . just now with AI!

Well, maybe we'll get good recommendations on the type of glue to put in our pizza sauce with the new hard-hitting pieces sure to come out of WaPo.

hnthrowaway0328 2y ago

They are just chasing winds. You can clearly see that there are two kinds of CEOs, the ones that bring the wind such as Huang, and others who chase. Unfortunately the later also gets paid big bucks and busy putting golden parachutes on themselves. I'd argue that it's better to not have a CEO than having one of those.

VHRanger 2y ago
Note that Huang was the founder of Nvidia - he's not a naked ladder climber like Pichai or Krzanich at Intel previously. Huang made good moves with CUDA, being early on tensor cores by being forward looking. That said, Nvidia is selling the shovels here, it's easy to look good. Some companies have a real usecase for generative AI, but it's something like 5% of these stories. The rest is CEOs FOMOing
- b112 2y ago
  I think not a CEO FOMO on AI, but the share price FOMO. Announce AI? Potential share spike, or a counter to a dip. For example "poor earnings at The Post!", vs "We're shifting to AI!"
marcinzm 2y ago
The goal of the CEO is to drive the stock price up in whatever horizon investors care about. Usually it's not a long horizon. It's not to build a sustainable product or even a product at all.
- hnthrowaway0328 2y ago
  Many CEOs can't even do that properly. Check out Unity as a shiny example and they still get fat paycheck. In fact they gave themselves nice raises too if you check the SEC docs. Ironic, isn't it?
verisimi 2y ago
How about an AI CEO?!! It too would be a good cost cutting measure!
- hnthrowaway0328 2y ago
  I actually think an AI CEO is way better than the average one.

pjc50 2y ago

The goal is firing all the staff.

gedy 2y ago
Yes and to appear "innovative" doing so, since it's "because of AI" and not that they are going broke.

nicklecompte 2y ago

“After six months of investigation and $15m in consulting fees, we have determined that our crossword designer can easily be replaced with advanced AI.” [two days later] “Okay, a songbird known for its imitation abilities, starts with ‘r’, ‘twe’ in the middle... wait what, Rottweiler?????”

wslh 2y ago

No, AI is one thing today and another thing tomorrow but the trend is unstoppable. Clearly we need to understand the boundaries where AI is just "hallucination" but it is right here right now and evolving. Zillions of startups are doing AI now, most will died but some will survive in this collective experiments. Also, there was a time in HN when people argued before downvoting.

thejohnconway 2y ago
Or will it be like self-driving cars? Early gains, but then a long plateau? AI is just not at the stage where outfits like the WP should be "pivoting" to it (whatever that means). I suspect it just means producing more "content" with fewer people, and the result will be garbage. Journalism doesn't need more content-filler type articles.
rsynnott 2y ago
> No, AI is one thing today and another thing tomorrow but the trend is unstoppable. [..] Zillions of startups are doing AI now, most will died but some will survive in this collective experiments. Substitute 'Blockchain' for 'AI' and this is a comment from 2016 or so. Not to say that one can predict the doom of 'AI' on that basis, but lots of VC money being ploughed into a thing does not necessarily mean that the thing will become a Thing.
- pheatherlite 2y ago
  Block chain was easy to avoid. Yes the hysteria was the same, but the foundational and fundamental shifts in how the common person does something has changed for many. I've noticed with my own 'non techie' family members who have started using various integrations of LLM and less Google. An impact of something on society at large can usually be measured by how it is used by the youth of today. Chatgpt started by aiding kids in their assignments, but now many depend on it for answers to various non academic questions. Whereas Block chain was not part of an average 5th grader's daily computer usage.
- wslh 2y ago
  I have companies in Blockchain, and in AI, and in Cybersecurity and can say that it is not the same. Blockchain never delivered for most people. For example, blockchain promised banks for the unbanked and the unbanked now use PSPs with mobile phone apps but not crypto. AI is delivering... I wonder why I need to explain this. In the dot com era there were a lot of hype about Internet... few consumers, then... kids don't know what Internet is while using mobile phone apps.

philjohn 2y ago

It was ever thus - remember when everything was about "The Cloud"? TheOnion satirical news report about HP adopting "That cloud thing that everyone is talking about" is still relevant 11 years later: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ntPxdWAWq8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ntPxdWAWq8

Tenoke 2y ago
In all fairness, most things did move to the cloud.
- danielbln 2y ago
  Yep, I remember the comments back in the day: "it's just someone else's datacenter", "that's maybe for startups, no bigger corp worth their name will give their infrastructure to some third party". Fast forward to today, the vast majority of our clients (Germany) have their infra in Azure, the rest uses AWS with GCP being a distant third. Apart from some GPU boxes for LLM tests, none of our clients have any non-cloud/local hardware/DCs anymore.
  - littlestymaar 2y ago
    And the most interesting part is that it's still an irrational thing, everybody moved towards it, lost money in the process, but they did it nonetheless. Amazon, Microsoft and Google won big at the expense of pretty much everybody else. And that's exactly what they hope they can achieve again with AI…
    - zztop44 2y ago
      I’ve definitely benefited from having practically infinite computing power be just one API call (and credit card bill) away. I remember before AWS and provisioning computing resources was way more time consuming and annoying.
      - soco 2y ago

seydor 2y ago

Either you get on board or you get under it

JSDevOps 2y ago

It's just so cringe, No one has a clue what it means in real terms just put AI on "it" and hope for the best. i.e Hope we get some of that cash from somewhere.

fullshark 2y ago
It means "stop paying all these reporters and cut our costs cause we lost 77 million last year."

theeandthy 2y ago

And anxious I suppose. Journalism should be synonymous with “people” and healthy society. AI and journalism is going to yield one giant ball of misinformation. I would love to say “we need more printed papers” like the good ‘ol days, but people don’t much have the patience to read by and large. To be honest, at one time I was worried about the young generation and devices. But I’m starting to see older family members are getting plugged into the algorithm.

b112 2y ago
Journalism should be synonymous with “people” People based journalism in 2030: "AI seems to be exhibiting AGI characteristics, experts concerned" AI based: "Recent solar activity may cause unusual AI behaviour, nothing to be concerned about"

rsynnott 2y ago

It's late-stage tech bubble stuff; compare the period when people were trying to shoehorn Our Lord and Saviour the Blockchain into everything. The goal shifts from "we should use Buzzword where it is useful" to "we should use Buzzword so that we are using Buzzword".

raxxorraxor 2y ago

I believe we will get a lot more "industrially manufactured" stories. Just pay for API access to reuters or another press agency and let the AI rewrite the content and push it on your news site ready to be consumed. Content is wrongly summarized? I doubt in the news economy this hardly matters anymore.

tcgv 2y ago

"Pivot to AI" is a strategy. A desperate one nonetheless. From the article, this strategy is being announced to achieve a business goal: > the newspaper will be looking for ways to use AI in its reporting as it seeks to recoup some of the $77 million it lost last year. A company's vision/mission are higher-level determinations, almost like their "constitution"; everything below (goals, strategy, objectives, plans) should be defined in alignment with it. Here you can find WaPo's mission statement: - https://www.washingtonpost.com/about-the-post/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/about-the-post/

xnx 2y ago

We'll know it's full hype when Long Island Iced Tea Corp. changes its name to Long AIsland Iced Tea Corp.