Enormous lay offs at Oralce/Cerna this week, nearly 20% of their global workforce about about 40% in India.
My first reaction was this was a a response to over extending themselves on AI, but then I thought I remembered them announcing really good numbers just a few weeks ago and so checked
Three weeks earlier, Oracle had reported its best organic growth quarter in 15 years: $17.2 billion in revenue, up 22%. Net income jumped 95% to $6.13 billion. Cloud infrastructure revenue surged 84%. Remaining performance obligations, the contracted revenue not yet recognized, reached $553 billion, up 325% year over year.
This is a company that is doing well yet is still constrained by their financial obligations to their AI build outs. It is a financial move to free up cash for that rather than a one reflecting near term expectations of efficiencies they will see from AI that eliminate the need for the jobs. It’s a complicated story, but a brutal situation
1 Like
It reminds me of an infamous review of John Lennon’s Wedding Album.
The UK weekly music newspaper Melody Maker ran a notorious review written by Richard Williams, who had been given a promotional copy containing two discs, each of which contained a test signal on one side. Williams duly reviewed what he thought was a double album, noting that “constant listening reveals a curious point: the pitch of the tones alters frequency, but only by microtones or, at most, a semitone. This oscillation produces an almost subliminal, uneven ‘beat’ which maintains interest. On a more basic level, you could have a ball by improvising your very own raga, plainsong, or even Gaelic mouth music against the drone.”
https://urls.grow.me/lseyRut5zG
Incidentally, if you have ever heard the actual album, the test signal was probably the best bit.
1 Like
I’ve had a cautious dabble with it recently. Interesting stuff.
First, was related to some work on my never ending van project. It currently uses a custom engine management system which I’ve never been happy with. So I was considering going OEM and queried what would be involved etc. it also gave me a few things to look at on my current set up. If that works then it’s a positive.
The second was stuff related to my health and how I can integrate training into it and what the impacts are etc. I also wanted to understand what impacts the medication I’m on has on specific aspects of my fitness goals. Some interesting stuff but I still need to do more here.
Word of note, I’m being very cautious about the answers it spits out. With the second query in particular it has given me something to look into further, using more traditional research methods.
There some interesting stuff and being honest a bit crap too.
Enshitification of AI products is happening at pace because of the unsustainable pricing of the GenAI capabilities they were built on.
https://x.com/edzitron/status/2043495946584285438?s=20
Imagine having spent the last 12 months retooling your entire org to transition to coding via Claude Code because it saves time and money and now you’ve lost 50% of your staff engineers Anthropic turns around and changes the useage tiers making using it the way they told you to cost prohibitive
1 Like
I can understand the frustration, but it isn’t like ‘tech company gets customer base dependent on product, then jacks up the price’ is an unexpected development.
1 Like
I’ve just been watching a documentary about AI and its impact on society called “Grayson Perry Has Seen The Future”. I think it’s on the Channel 4 player. It may be of interest.
2 Likes
This made me chuckle
The patterns from GenAI drafted content are so obvious once you pick them up and you then realize how much content is being made on socials with this shit. LinkedIn particularly has become unbearable.
2 Likes
Yes. The difference here is that enshitification normally just leaves you dissatisfied with a product you could cancel/get rid off but the friction from getting rid is too much to justify so you just suck it up. The difference with the incorporation of AI into business practice is it has been done with a promise of cost effectiveness and so has cost people jobs and done so with a path that has already run into a dead end in term of cost savings. And it is exasperating how short sighted it was to think this would not happen given how predictable it all is.
The typical debate about the use and risks of GenAI has focused on whether it is catastrophically dangerous or simply a “stochastic parrot”. But the real well informed skepticism has IMO come from the people saying “this is useful, what is the actual business use case for this once it starts being priced properly at the rate it needs to be for these companies to stop hemorrhaging money?” I have reached a point at my work where I feel I need to pivot my core product pretty substantially. Those conversations that need to be had in the company to approve that sort of pivot are really tough and get tougher the higher up in the food chain you go where the ideas being discussed become more abstract to the people you’re talking to. What people think they understand about the conversation is often not what should have been taken from it. AI has given me a completely different avenue to solving this problem. Cursor is one of the popular GenAI driven coding tools and I used that to build a redesigned PoC version of my product from scratch in about 4 days and with no coding knowledge at all. If I spent that time working on a power point to explain the concept there would have been a huge gap in understanding in the people from whom I need to get buy in for this pivot. Had I worked with my UX lead on putting story boards together it would have taken weeks to get here and wouldn’t have been as tightly aligned with my vision of what I’ve produced, or even as intuitive as a legit clickable product. So it’s valuable no doubt, but I looked at the cost the project accrued and fuck me…and we havent even had our rates changed yet the way some of these other big companies and high usage groups have.
I strongly buy the argument that this can rapidly accelerate parts of certain businesses. I think the conversations I am going to be able to have with other people in my business are going to be so much better and more effective when centered on this PoC than any other sort of artifact we could have used in the past, and hopefully that means we all move forward with much tighter alignment than we’d have been able to get before. But this is not a cost effective way to work.
1 Like
