Aaron Levie: Startups win in the AI era [video]
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I worked at box, albeit for only a year, and saw Aaron’s passion up close. He could step into an executive briefing center meeting and pull out projects the customer was working on a year prior that didn’t directly involve box and ask honest, empathetic questions about it.
He’s a nerd and loves talking about this stuff. Those saying he’s trying to remain relevant or find a new hole for box miss the fact he’s on cnbc and other business channels a few times a year just talking tech. Unless Houston who only shows up when Dropbox has a sad launch to tout.
Aaron is passionate about Box and has been fighting an uphill battle since day one but I’ve held on to my thousands of shares since I left and the value has doubled. I fully expect AI to accelerate their future and lead to a bigger balance sheet.
So sure their CEO is passionate and on CNBC but the business is clearly not doing that great
(Not asking you to go dig that up, just making the point that the market can be irrational.)
There's some strangeness around AI where people will claim it will do amazing things, but somehow not so amazing that no one will need them.
Especially liked the framing of structured vs unstructured data, and the opportunity to make unstructured data more useful with llmns.
I do not have much criticize or add except to emphasize that ai as it is now is probabilistic, not deterministic -- ask the same question twice and you could get vastly different answers.
Well, there is this as well - https://finance.yahoo.com/news/openai-board-chair-doubles-do...
Altman was touring globally to raise $7T (yes, trillion), just a few months ago. So, not sure if they are purposefully trying to scare off people.
A few points about that: It wasn't just a few months ago, it was more than a year ago; he wasn't raising funds for OpenAI, it was for a separate chip-building venture; the $7T number was universally regarded as laughable, and the whole thing has predictably gone nowhere; and, FWIW, both OpenAI and Altman have publicly denied that he was ever trying to raise such a comical amount.
Obviously the state of “workers and AI together” comes first. So there’s not going to be some strawman cliff where suddenly all jobs are replaced in a month.
But people like him lay out this future and then act like AI just stops there. Of course there will be an intermediate state. And then that state will be passed over as AI move further up the chain and humans are eliminated from office labor entirely.
I don’t think this is the case.
The way this manifests isn’t mass layoffs after an AI is implemented, it’s fewer people being hired at any given scale because you can go further with fewer people.
Companies making billions in revenue with under 10k employees, some under 5k or even under 1k.
This is absorbed by there being more and more opportunities because the cost of starting a new company and getting revenue decreases too as labor productivity increases.
Jobs that would otherwise exist get replaced. Jobs at companies that otherwise wouldn’t exist get created.
And in the long run until it’s just unprofitable to employ humans (when the max their productivity is worth relative to AI falls below a living wage), humans will continue working side by side with AGI as even relatively unproductive workers (compared to AI) will still be net productive.
This assumes that humans will be unwilling to work if their wage is below living. It depends on the social programs of the government, but if there is none, or only very bad ones, people will probably be more desperate and thus be more willing to work in even the cheapest jobs.
So in this overabundance of human labor world, the cost of human labor might be much closer to zero than living wage. It all depends on how desperate to find work government policy will make humans.
I don’t think this is true. I think CEOs are replacing people on the assumption that AI will be able to replace their jobs. But I don’t think AIs are able to replace any jobs other than heavily scripted ones like front-line customer support… maybe.
I think AI can automate some tasks with supervision, especially if you’re okay with mediocre results and don’t need to spend a lot of time verifying its work. Stock photography, for example.
But to say AI is replacing jobs, I think you’d need to be specific about what jobs and how AI is replacing them… other than CEOs following the hype, and later backtracking.
Can you though? From my experience this is just a wishful thinking. I am yet to see actual productivity gains from AI that would objectively justify hiring less or laying off people.
How many people did it take to build the pyramids? Now how many would it take today?
Look at revenue per head and how it’s trended
Look at how much AUM has flowed into asset management while headcount has flatlined
I can not imagine a scenario other than complete model stagnation that would lead to the current workforce there of 213,000 people still having jobs to do.
Like it’s a strawman to assume I’m arguing that your nanny or the local firefighters are going to be replaced by an AI soon.
And it also seems like people expect some normative assumption when taking about job loss. I’m not making a normative claim, nor a policy one, just pointing out it seems stupid to not prepare or expect this to happen.
Conversely, why aren't the senior leaders of Google Drive, SharePoint, etc. so consistently speaking about the benefits of AI?
A couple top of mind thoughts on the range of outcomes:
-Perhaps it's more of a requisite function of a company that went through a long phase of mild-growth (even anemic relative to the Nasdaq composite) and is seeking to maintain relevance with PR/Marketing spend
-They are investing in a step function product roadmap that could accelerate revenue growth and are positioning the brand for a future product launch.
-A slightly more cynical view, the CEO is searching for a new home for the company? It's been over 20 years, which fees like long time for a public technology company to have a single CEO.
-The CEO is positioning himself personally for a new VC fund. He's had some success with previous investments and is looking to preemptively market his new fund.
-A slightly more realistic view, the CEO (who seems really enthusiastic) is honestly just like the rest of us and got nerd-swiped by this AI thing and feels genuinely excited about it :-)
Either way he seems very well networked and able to appear nearly everywhere and re-cap information and insights from other source material. I'm curious what the underlying incentives/outcomes are for this kind of PR blitz.
Google execs are constantly talking about the benefits of AI. People lower on the totem pole just don't have the same platform as the top execs at Google do.
And by Google, I mean Alphabet, not just search.