Of course they went with both, and as far as I can tell both are a major disaster post layoffs :)
To placate the AI fans, that's not because AI isn't interesting, it's because that's how these hype cycles always go. I remember when everything had to be XML'd. XML has its uses, but a lot of money was wasted jamming it everywhere because XML Was Cool. AI has its uses, but it is still an engineering tool; it has a grain, it has things it is good at, it has things it can't just wave a magic wand and improve, the demarcation between those two things is very, very complicated, and people are being actively discouraged from thinking about those lines right now.
But there really isn't any skipping the Trough of Disillusionment on your way to the Plateau of Productivity.
That was probably before my time. Was it really "cool"? Like big data, cloud and agile cool? Or more like ... dunno ... some design pattern? So hard to think about XML as having been cool.
I pushed for local first models but the cost tradeoff just did not make sense for anything but the biggest clients, and they were constantly swapping back and forth whether openai would be acceptable or not for "insert sensitive use case here"
Mostly just a big cluster