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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

#251

Post by chefandy »

v1ne wrote: post #172
chefandy wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Picking up and moving to the “it” tech city assuming you’ll get hired sounds like a great solution… that is, if you don’t have family obligations, or, really… a family, long-term responsibilities of any kind, a chronic health condition, or lack money to support an expensive interstate/city/country move probably with an increased cost of living while unemployed… and all to assume that your employer is going to cast yo…

Well, maybe there's a deeper truth to qp11's statement: I completely agree that moving to the tech city _du jour_ caters to the demographic of mid-20 "anywheres". Having a family, long-term friends or obligations such as elderly care rules you out. Or god forbid: A time-consuming hobby or in general something apart from work that gives meaning to your life. And that's exactly the point! You only get those high wages…

Stockholm syndrome. Mercantile utility being the only driving factor that governs these actions is exactly the problem. You're expending your life-- no more or less valuable than the life of the CEO or shareholders-- to give the CEO and shareholders a fantastically luxurious life that was, in nearly every case, only afforded to them because of existing wealth. That's fucked up. What's even more fucked up is that it's stratifying more, not less. Succumbing to this very well-marketed idea that we're worth no more than our monetary value in a market is one of the driving factors.

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

#252

Post by chefandy »

ycdxvjp wrote: post #118
chefandy wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Picking up and moving to the “it” tech city assuming you’ll get hired sounds like a great solution… that is, if you don’t have family obligations, or, really… a family, long-term responsibilities of any kind, a chronic health condition, or lack money to support an expensive interstate/city/country move probably with an increased cost of living while unemployed… and all to assume that your employer is going to cast yo…

It's feasible. I have done it. Moved to Singapore and now in South Korea with family. I think experienced people have lot of interesting options. Many don't look.

You moved a family to Singapore without a job based on the assumption you'd get hired? That's what the comment I'm responding to is proposing. If so, you are unrepresentatively wealthy.

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

#253

Post by dekhn »

xnx wrote: post #249
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…

Weird to call Google Assistant failed when it's about to get vastly more capable by being wired to Bard/Gemini. Already, I want to talk to Google Assistant like it's an LLM, but it's not there yet.

LLMs at Google aren't going to augment Assistant, they're going to replace it. With something that isn't an assistant, and doesn't do anything useful.

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

#254

Post by matchbok »

bananapub wrote: post #165

wonder if there will be any actual consequences for senior management this time? I'd be absolutely fascinated to see the analysis of how they decided that eliminating the (almost) sacrosanct rule of "oh don't worry about your project, if it gets canned you can just chill out for a bit and find another team" was worthwhile. how valuable did they think instilling fear in the company was?

That's not how any business works. Googlers aren't entitled to a job at Google, believe it or not. Even if their feelings are hurt.

Please, please, take 1 minute and imagine a world where a company is punished by (someone?) for laying people off. Please think of the consequences of that. lol.

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

#255

Post by hindsightbias »

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…

Nobody maintains anything anymore anyway. Even a company that sells 18M laptops a year for $30B can't be bothered to timely fix their OS bugs.

So that's 99% of the code base right there. X has proven 80% aren't doing much of importance.

Of the remaining 1%, 3/4ths are probably rewriting to some flavor of the week and 1/4th are developing some real feature.

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

#256

Post by fnord123 »

mmmmmbop wrote: post #239
fnord123 wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A product that has become pervasive in most households in America You think Google home has over 50% penetration?

Assistant is included on most Android devices nowadays. Assuming smartphones in general have 90%+ market penetration, 42% market share for Android, and an average household size of 3, it seems reasonable to assume that 50%+ of households will have at least one device running Assistant.

You think over 100% of people use Google Assistant on their Android smartphone?

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

#257

Post by dieortin »

danjac wrote: post #226
vineyardmike wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's the end of an industry as we knew it. I was considering agreeing that "the old Silicon Valley" was probably no more. > There will be demand for developers in some very specific sectors and specialities Yea.... > and some legacy code support for a while, Well sure, we still famously have Cobol... > but likely most of us will be out of work within the next few years. Hmm. Uh. > "things will pick up again Real So…

I see very little evidence for it coming back. The economy in aggregate may be healthy (depending where you live) but that doesn't mean software developers will be in much demand.

And wouldn’t there be demand for software developers suddenly?

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

#258

Post by dieortin »

danjac wrote: post #225
theshackleford wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So basically you have nothing. Thanks for confirming I guess.

I already pointed out there's going to be legacy work for a while, especially in certain specialisations. Everything else "AI powered developers are going to startup all the things!!!" is just hype by some poster literally calling themselves (ironically I hope) ChatGPT.

You still have not provided a single reason why software developers are supposedly going to become useless overnight

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

#259

Post by vineyardmike »

fnord123 wrote: post #188
vineyardmike wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yea! A product that has become pervasive in most households in America, that does it's one task, and tries to do it well. The problem is that companies built out these organizations and marketed these products as the next step of computing after mobile, and it's just not that easy to monetize. My washer/drier, "all it can do" is spin clothes around and apply heat. I paid a lot more money for that "failed experiment".…

> A product that has become pervasive in most households in America You think Google home has over 50% penetration?

Between GAssistant, Alexa and Siri Speakers I bet it’s a significant chunk of the population.

Sonos now have a voice assistant (far more limited though) and many cars are rolling out some sort of assistant too.

I know plenty of people with multiple speakers and from competing brands.

Oh and obviously every iPhone in the last decade has it built in. That’s 50% of the population right there. Then there’s android phones, where I don’t know if they all have it wakeword enabled, but it’s probably another big chunk too.

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

#260

Post by vineyardmike »

mmmmmbop wrote: post #239
fnord123 wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A product that has become pervasive in most households in America You think Google home has over 50% penetration?

Assistant is included on most Android devices nowadays. Assuming smartphones in general have 90%+ market penetration, 42% market share for Android, and an average household size of 3, it seems reasonable to assume that 50%+ of households will have at least one device running Assistant.

I agree with the sentiment, but i don’t think you can go from 42% of the population to >50% of households. Especially because households probably cluster, so it’s probably strictly less than 42% of households use android.
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