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Dropbox to reduce global workforce by about 16%, or 500 staff

blog.dropbox.com

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Re: Dropbox to reduce global workforce by about 16%, or 500 staff

#101

Post by williamdclt »

thesimon wrote: post #82
ignoramous wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an example: Dropbox can answer questions from the documents you've shared with them. They stand a good chance as anyone else to build a "personal chatgpt" / "enterprise chatgpt". Dropbox is also big on photos, I believe, the latest advancements give them a shot at taking on Google Photos.

But how can you be certain that the answer is actually correct instead of just sounding correct? ChatGPT can come up with completely made-up answers that just seem right.

and yet it keeps being a useful tool.

Re: Dropbox to reduce global workforce by about 16%, or 500 staff

#102

Post by pokstad »

AJRF wrote: post #41

"These transitions are never easy, but I’m determined to ensure that Dropbox is at the forefront of the AI era, just as we were at the forefront of the shift to mobile and the cloud. We’ll need all hands on deck as machine intelligence gives us the tools to reimagine our existing businesses and invent new ones. And I'm committed to doing everything in my power to best position ourselves for the future and unlock our…

Probably advanced Q&A chatbot trained on your company’s documents. Imagine how that could improve onboarding if you can ask AI how things work in your company.

Re: Dropbox to reduce global workforce by about 16%, or 500 staff

#106

Post by [deleted] »

dheera wrote: post #62
smcl wrote: post #2

Nice, round number. I wonder if that was a carefully thought out coincidence, or they fiddled with the numbers a bit until they got the right payroll savings then rounded it to the nearest 100. I suspect the latter - when I see a nice, round number of people being fired it makes me think that they decided "how many people do we need to sacrifice to appease the finance gods" rather than "how many of these roles are re…

> Nice, round number. 500 is also a businessy-salesy round number, compared to 512 which is what an engineer would have considered a round number. Gives some clues as to where the number came from.

[deleted]

Re: Dropbox to reduce global workforce by about 16%, or 500 staff

#107

Post by never_inline »

berkle4455 wrote: post #44
soared wrote: post #18

> In an ideal world, we’d simply shift people from one team to another. And we’ve done that wherever possible. However, our next stage of growth requires a different mix of skill sets, particularly in AI and early-stage product development. We’ve been bringing in great talent in these areas over the last couple years and we'll need even more. Imagine building a company that lets users store files online, seeing chatg…

What if they had a little animated AI assistant that watched what you were doing and would say helpful things like “Hey! I see you’re writing a document, perhaps you should store that on Dropbox?” or “Hey! I see you’re making a meme, want to share that using Dropbox?”

This would be a great meme if they fired 16% people to make an chatgpt microsoft bob.

Re: Dropbox to reduce global workforce by about 16%, or 500 staff

#108

Post by yellow_postit »

rwmj wrote: post #81

About the AI thing (assuming it's true and not merely a convenient excuse for layoffs): Is every company just planning to feed all of their customer data through GPT / OpenAI, or will they build their own AIs? The first choice seems risky, from a business, legal and privacy perspective. The second one would require a large amount of capital and has many other risks.

Given the rise of foundational models the tuning/adaptation on top is quite a bit cheaper.

I imagine foundation models become a bit like cloud provider paas offerings vs rolling your own data centers.

Re: Dropbox to reduce global workforce by about 16%, or 500 staff

#109

Post by Hikikomori »

soared wrote: post #18

> In an ideal world, we’d simply shift people from one team to another. And we’ve done that wherever possible. However, our next stage of growth requires a different mix of skill sets, particularly in AI and early-stage product development. We’ve been bringing in great talent in these areas over the last couple years and we'll need even more. Imagine building a company that lets users store files online, seeing chatg…

Why would you need ai when you can just sort your files yourself, manually inspect your files for the one you want because normal search is inadequate...

Re: Dropbox to reduce global workforce by about 16%, or 500 staff

#110

Post by rybosworld »

Hamcha wrote: post #93
rco8786 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Imagine building a company that lets users store files online, seeing chatgpt released, and then laying off 16% of your company to.. use ai to store files better? I really don’t see how new ai capabilities lead to big layoffs and new opportunities for Dropbox snark incoming - Imagine thinking you understand the product strategy for a 14 year old, publicly traded company with thousands of employees without working t…

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. However, I also totally see the point, as an example: the biggest reason I like Google Photos is the automagic tagging on the pictures, I can just write any random description and it usually finds them across 10+ years of photos I have stored (not perfect, bu…

> 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.

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