<story><title>Amazon cuts &apos;several hundred&apos; jobs in Alexa division</title><url>https://www.cnbc.com/2023/11/17/amazon-cuts-several-hundred-jobs-in-alexa-division.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tsunamifury</author><text>I&amp;#x27;ve been out of Google for a year now so I can share this story:&lt;p&gt;I created the AI suggestion chip at Google, which combined with an internal project called Jane, became the Google Assistant.  At the time Sundar was desperate for a narrative to counter Alexa in front of investors and wanted a HUGE I&amp;#x2F;O announcement, so off we sprinted.&lt;p&gt;But I went to the executives at the time in charge and said look, this really isn&amp;#x27;t going to be an assistant if it doesn&amp;#x27;t have the APIs into services that users need to accomplish actual tasks.  Sharing some information and changing the music isn&amp;#x27;t what a butler does, a butler anticipates your needs and executes on them -- and we can&amp;#x27;t do that until we have the APIs to anticipate and execute.&lt;p&gt;I was, of course, ignored, because in my naiveness at the time and I didn&amp;#x27;t realize it didn&amp;#x27;t matter what the assistant DID, it mattered what the narrative to investors was about its potential.  So 2017 I&amp;#x2F;O Sundar announces the assistant and it looks great inside Allo, and it&amp;#x27;s a great demo -- mission accomplished.&lt;p&gt;Now 6 years+ later, it&amp;#x27;s a stagnant, overspent team across the space -- because why?  Because it can&amp;#x27;t do anything for users.  All these years and billions later it still can&amp;#x27;t do anything important -- it has no user journey.&lt;p&gt;And it took me equally as long to realize, that still doesn&amp;#x27;t matter. FAANG has gotten so large that the stock bump that comes from narrative outpaces actual revenue from working products.  It makes for a crazy world... because ironically Google ALSO invented the truly disruptive transformer technology behind the LLM and when we tried to launch that with MINA, Sundar blocked it!  Too disruptive, no narrative, too scary...&lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#x27;t know the lesson to be learned here, but wow, it just makes me want to give up...</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>solardev</author><text>For what it&amp;#x27;s worth, all I ever wanted it to do was to be able to reliably turn off lights and play the right music.&lt;p&gt;Nearly a decade later, when I say &amp;quot;turn off the music&amp;quot;, it&amp;#x27;ll pause Netflix on the TV I&amp;#x27;m actively watching (and talking to it through) while the speaker in the other room keeps playing music. Or if you ask it turn off the light, the whole house goes dark.&lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#x27;t need it to read minds, but it sure would&amp;#x27;ve been nice for it to understand the difference between a TV, a music speaker, and a light bulb.&lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#x27;t know how Google works (or doesn&amp;#x27;t, apparently), but I often wished they just sat down with a few interns and manually went through the top 100 most used commands and made manual command chains for them.&lt;p&gt;The assistants are annoying not because they&amp;#x27;re not AGI enough, but because they can&amp;#x27;t reliably do the simple tasks that we actually want to offload to them...</text></comment>
<story><title>Amazon cuts &apos;several hundred&apos; jobs in Alexa division</title><url>https://www.cnbc.com/2023/11/17/amazon-cuts-several-hundred-jobs-in-alexa-division.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tsunamifury</author><text>I&amp;#x27;ve been out of Google for a year now so I can share this story:&lt;p&gt;I created the AI suggestion chip at Google, which combined with an internal project called Jane, became the Google Assistant.  At the time Sundar was desperate for a narrative to counter Alexa in front of investors and wanted a HUGE I&amp;#x2F;O announcement, so off we sprinted.&lt;p&gt;But I went to the executives at the time in charge and said look, this really isn&amp;#x27;t going to be an assistant if it doesn&amp;#x27;t have the APIs into services that users need to accomplish actual tasks.  Sharing some information and changing the music isn&amp;#x27;t what a butler does, a butler anticipates your needs and executes on them -- and we can&amp;#x27;t do that until we have the APIs to anticipate and execute.&lt;p&gt;I was, of course, ignored, because in my naiveness at the time and I didn&amp;#x27;t realize it didn&amp;#x27;t matter what the assistant DID, it mattered what the narrative to investors was about its potential.  So 2017 I&amp;#x2F;O Sundar announces the assistant and it looks great inside Allo, and it&amp;#x27;s a great demo -- mission accomplished.&lt;p&gt;Now 6 years+ later, it&amp;#x27;s a stagnant, overspent team across the space -- because why?  Because it can&amp;#x27;t do anything for users.  All these years and billions later it still can&amp;#x27;t do anything important -- it has no user journey.&lt;p&gt;And it took me equally as long to realize, that still doesn&amp;#x27;t matter. FAANG has gotten so large that the stock bump that comes from narrative outpaces actual revenue from working products.  It makes for a crazy world... because ironically Google ALSO invented the truly disruptive transformer technology behind the LLM and when we tried to launch that with MINA, Sundar blocked it!  Too disruptive, no narrative, too scary...&lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#x27;t know the lesson to be learned here, but wow, it just makes me want to give up...</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ryandrake</author><text>This is what bothers me about all of this &amp;quot;investment&amp;quot; into AI now. Is it the same thing? Just purely CEO performance art to mollify stupid and uncreative Investment Banking analysts so they can fill in the cell in their spreadsheet that makes stock price go up? &amp;quot;Yes. Mister Johnson at Goldman, we, also have an AI strategy for 2024, very similar to BigCoXyz who you also model...&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;It seems that companies don&amp;#x27;t have to do anything anymore--they just have to spin a story for Wall Street and make sure they lap it up.</text></comment>