To add to that, Product leadership at technology companies has evolved to be much less technical, so they aren't going to have any deep insight about AI that, say, a software engineer who has worked in that field might have.
But hey, if in a few years Dropbox launches a popular AI-based feature I'll gladly eat my words because I'll probably be using it. They could benefit from enhancing their search functionality, for example -- but that's just a nice-to-have feature, not something revolutionary.
In an enterprise, it can be extremely difficult to ensure your permissions are what you want them to be: that people can share things easily with the right groups, but also that sensitive data is not inadvertently exposed. Dropbox in particular excels at sharing documents with others outside your company, but that is also where there is obviously the most risk.
Currently, I find Dropbox's enterprise permissions management tools pretty difficult to use. There are loads of options and it's too easy to get something "wrong" if you inadvertently miss checking the right checkbox. It's not hard for me to see how AI tools could help improve this situation, and especially to provide additional capabilities in the DLP (data loss prevention) space that would make it easier to detect misconfigured access.
This seems the exact opposite of what the current crop of AI is good at.
Yeah, last thing I want when trying to share a file with people outside of my organization is some opaque kafkaesque chatgpt-wannabe model telling me "I’m sorry Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that".
1. Letting users enter desired permissions setting in a natural language, and then the AI recommending checkbox settings, and, importantly, explaining these settings.
2. Useful as a monitoring/alerting system for DLP. Most DLP systems already use some sort of machine learning for identifying sensitive docs.
3. Easily running "test scenarios" to show to admins who can and can't get access to particular docs.
There is a huge chasm between "AI owns all my permission settings" to "AI can make it easier and more robust for me to understand what my permission settings should be."
> Currently, I find Dropbox's enterprise permissions management tools pretty difficult to use.
These two sentences were one after the other. So which way is it?
That’s only because it failed (and the jury is still out on that). If it works they’ll conquer an entirely new market right from the start.
Certainly a much better long term strategy than hoping they can keep up their advertising revenue.
The "metaverse" is ironically set up to be Facebook's walled garden. It has no other use, it cannot be repurposed or made modular in any way. It's not a standalone product that say, integrates with Google Ads, something that they could try to offload to some other company.
It's Zuck's baby, and in the middle of slow and protracted crib death.
Facebook has their own platform but it's built on top of others so it can be choked off. Facebook wants its own OS.
The last 15 years of tech says otherwise. Tesla is the most obvious counterpoint to this example. I don't think the Metaverse is useful, but my issue with Facebook isn't that he poured 30B into what was essentially R&D.
That's just your hindsight bias. Lot of companies have spent billions of dollars chasing apparently worthless product ideas. Some of them turned out to be big hits - electric car in 2009, social media based on 140 characters posting limit, online bookstore, a website to check out pics of your classmates and poke them etc.
I like the fact that Facebook was audacious enough to spend 40B dollars on trying out something new. If successful, it would have opened up a huge new field for tinkering, just like the wave of social media companies in 2009-10.
If I built a company and eventually found myself in extremely high value (ie, 9 figures), I'd be looking to retire ASAP. That would be it. I won capitalism. Time to spend the rest of my life on Maui sipping Mai-Tais on the beach.
Why anybody would want to continue to work when they already have enough wealth to live an extremely lavish lifestyle without working ever again is beyond me.
Is probably extremely boring - I have never had more fun than when solving problems, life without working on something interesting sounds insufferable to me
How long would I be able to sit on Maui sipping Mai-Tais? Getting massages, ... and more ... whatever I want, whenever I want it ... that is a curse actually.
Surrounded by fake people everyone wanting a piece of the wealth trickle down to them.
On a personal experience, I was a lot happier when I bought my first house, a rundown estate that was the cheapest on the street that then I had to work to improve upon it, ended up replacing most inside and out, some parts I learned to do myself - I ended up remodeling it piecemeal but so, so satisfying
My second house is very respectable, newer, larger, technically incomparably better, it is not even the same ballpark ... yet my new house never provided me with the same joy.
Be careful what you wish for.
With that perspective, the best thing to do is keep on pushing. Despite whatever pain and headache that might bring, it's one act our short lives can use to push against entropy and the dying universe.
If I ever come into such wealth, I'll spend it all solving as much as I can through my direct involvement.
Pet hypothesis: A lot of us say that, not being in the position to. But when you finally exit the working class and are no longer required to work, people tend to work on passion projects instead. Sitting on the beach gets boring after a while.
There is strong correlation between people who find themselves in 9 figures (outside of inheritance) and people who have completely opposite worldview from yours. If you make money to retire to Maui, you will take the first off ramp which allows you to do it which is way before you get into 9 figures.
Literally every company. That doesn't mean that a strategy doesn't exist and is actively curated and maintained by people whose full-time job it is to do so. It's always an educated guess at best. But it's pretty silly to come into a thread like this and be like "psh they store files what could they possibly do with AI".
I would have thought HN would celebrate a company that's publicly decided to stop fucking with the Wi-Fi.
Ooh betting on a failure? That is the easiest bet ever. If I bet on everything failing, I would win 99% of the time.
