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Google lays off hundreds working on its voice-activated assistant

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Re: Google lays off hundreds working on its voice-activated assistant

#211

Post by bitshiftfaced »

RHSeeger wrote: post #49
razodactyl wrote: post #37

Why lay-off instead of repurpose? Will we consider smartphones as "Personal Assistants" anytime soon? AI has advanced considerably in terms of what can be processed locally but the restructure seems a bit over the top considering it's still the same concept in a broader sense. It's like laying off a team of developers simply because you changed branding.

I seem to recall Google saying that they don't hire for a specific position; they hire good developers and then find the right position for them. This idea is directly countered by the act of firing developers in a specific position because that position is no longer viable.

If we accept the premise, then why wouldn't it make sense to fire developers in specific positions? If a position is no longer viable, it won't matter to you if you fire that person, since presumably any person you choose would also be a "good developer."

Re: Google lays off hundreds working on its voice-activated assistant

#212

Post by ricktdotorg »

MattGaiser wrote: post #64
ASinclair wrote: post #20

It was much more broad than the Assistant org.

https://www.theverge.com/2024/1/10/24033994/google-reorganiz... Fitbit and AR too.

from a consumer perspective, the Fitbit acquisition has pretty much been a disaster/no-op:

- bizarre, fitness-feature-removal "updates" to the iOS Fitbit app

- piss-poor UI refresh

- very buggy "move Fitbit to your Google account" post-acqui-process

i suppose i was an idiot as a paying (G Suite) Google user + paying Fitbit user to expect anything other than Google:

1. acquiring fitbit

2. integrate Fitbit user tracking data into waves hands Borg

3. do All The Things that Google does with human tracking data etc

4. kill the app

Re: Google lays off hundreds working on its voice-activated assistant

#213

Post by theshackleford »

alephnan wrote: post #175

The finance industry expects people to work way harder then tech, but the E.V. is usually less. Yes, there are stories about quants making 7 figures, but that's exceedingly rare now compared to the early 2ks. The people who had this aptitude and skillset would have thrived in tech anyways. For example, Jeff Bezos used to be a trader. There was even a window of time where people in finance saw how the grass was greene…

> but it will no longer be the be the guaranteed path to being a millionaire after 5-10 years of working.

For the vast majority, this has not been a thing in the first place.

Re: Google lays off hundreds working on its voice-activated assistant

#214

Post by Maro »

modeless wrote: post #21

I don't use any feature of Google Assistant that wasn't present in the original Android voice search feature over a decade ago. And the few features I do use haven't improved in any way that I've noticed. In fact I feel like reliability has regressed. Google could have fired almost the whole team years ago and my user experience would not be different today. I consider voice assistants to be a failed experiment. It's…

I have multiple Google Home speaker devices at home. My experience that about 1/3 of the time, even in silence, it does not understand simple commands like "Stop" or "Pause". Sometimes I say "Stop" and it interprets this as "Stocks" and starts reading out stock prices. The fact that it only works 2/3 of the time makes it a frustrating UX, I hate trying to "use" it. (First world problems..)

Re: Google lays off hundreds working on its voice-activated assistant

#215

Post by kevingadd »

RHSeeger wrote: post #49
razodactyl wrote: post #37

Why lay-off instead of repurpose? Will we consider smartphones as "Personal Assistants" anytime soon? AI has advanced considerably in terms of what can be processed locally but the restructure seems a bit over the top considering it's still the same concept in a broader sense. It's like laying off a team of developers simply because you changed branding.

I seem to recall Google saying that they don't hire for a specific position; they hire good developers and then find the right position for them. This idea is directly countered by the act of firing developers in a specific position because that position is no longer viable.

That's definitely not how Google does hiring anymore. They don't do true generalist interviews, that's for sure. Every Google interview gauntlet I went through was at least 50% specialists asking me specialist questions, and in the end when I got hired it was when I got interviewed by specialists appropriate for my domain, and I was hired for a specific position.

Re: Google lays off hundreds working on its voice-activated assistant

#216

Post by usrusr »

modeless wrote: post #195
vineyardmike wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Skills are just APIs that conform to a similar look. We'll definitely continue to have AI-only or developed-for-AI APIs for future "agents" to act against. They probably won't spend much effort formatting text to sound good to a person, but the infrastructure is here.

I disagree. These special APIs will not have the breadth of capabilities that the human UI does, so AIs will use the human UIs out of necessity. But I think in the long term we will eventually see a simplification of UIs. As it becomes less common for humans to actually use them, they will no longer need fancy animations or dark mode or client-side validation or pretty styling. In the extreme, a return to plain HTML…

Isn't it the exact opposite? Interfaces we use every day can be dead simple, all they need is that they don't change behind our back. The accelerator pedal does not come with a footover pop-up "keep pressed to make car go". Interfaces we use once in a leap year on the other hand, that's where we need all the hand-holding we can get.

Re: Google lays off hundreds working on its voice-activated assistant

#217

Post by oldpersonintx »

matrix_overload wrote: post #28
sytelus wrote: post #13

Wow... What is going on it tech? We are just 10 days in the new year and every day there has been surprise layoffs! Unity Twitch Several startups And now.. Google! This is at the same time when stocks are almost all time high :).

High interest rates. If Fed dropped them to 0 overnight, everyone on the list would have happily hired everyone back. But then the grocery prices would start growing faster than SPX.

[dead]

Re: Google lays off hundreds working on its voice-activated assistant

#218

Post by BLKNSLVR »

trashtester wrote: post #114
BLKNSLVR wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> because AI can do it cheaper I'm interested to see how this works out in the mid-longer term to see where it tracks on the graph with "Cheaper" on one axis and "Better" on the other (where '0' is in the centre of the "Better" axis, not at the bottom/left).

Building an AI stack to perform some task can often be budgeted as capex even where it would be opex if humans did it. Capex tasks can be considered to be either "Cheaper" (as they're investments, not expenses) or "Better", since they create long term value on top of the short term, depending on how you want to define your axes. When doing this budgeting, moving items from opex to capex in this way is mostly based on…

Opex to capex is a reverse machine that goes ping.

And so the pendulum swings.

Re: Google lays off hundreds working on its voice-activated assistant

#219

Post by oldpersonintx »

ChatGTP wrote: post #163
danjac wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would be happy to be proven wrong.

Do you have any idea how much software there is in the world? What would you think it's just going to stop being produced and maintained tomorrow? Do you have any idea what the societal costs of such a change would be? Even if it was due to "AI", hundreds of thousands of AI augmented developers are going to be off launching new startups writing more and more software, hacking stuff, it's not just going to end tomorro…

[dead]

Re: Google lays off hundreds working on its voice-activated assistant

#220

Post by kvathupo »

neilv wrote: post #22

So what's a good employer now, now that Google has been losing the reputation for treating employees well? (Multiple rounds of laying off people isn't treating only those people poorly, but also increasing stress for the people who remain, knowing they can suddenly be laid off as well.)

I wonder if layoffs will affect company loyalty in the future? I'm leaning towards not, given the frequency of turnover at big tech companies for higher TC
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