Cisco slashes seven percent of workforce
www.theregister.com
Reorg of entire biz as tech giant addresses downturn in core networking segment
  • MyOpinion@lemm.ee
    781·
    3 months ago

    Pivot to AI! These companies are going to be in for a rude awakening when the AI scam collapses.

    • HobbitFoot @thelemmy.clubEnglish
      141·
      3 months ago

      What else is there? Hardware has become a commodity product and server side software is mainly modified FOSS.

        • Psychodelic@lemmy.world
          101·
          3 months ago

          Uhh… what?

          Could you pretend I don’t already know what you mean and explain what you’re trying to communicate a bit?

          • rand_alpha19@moist.catsweat.com
            31·
            3 months ago

            Exciting new technology comes out

            Companies want to profit from it without spending much

            Startups, major companies, and venture capital investment groups implement new tech services quickly to capitalize on new trend

            Stonks go up

            Users coalesce around some major options that have actual ideas outside of “let’s start a [new technology] company,” most others fail to innovate or offer actual value that meets the wild expectations of speculative investors

            Stonks go down, people lose their jobs, tech divisions crumble

            Who could have foreseen this!? (See also: blockchain, NFTs, etc.)

            • Psychodelic@lemmy.world
              4·
              3 months ago

              Thanks. That makes sense

              Who would be Enron in this scenario? I’m thinking of openai or Nvidia but can’t imagine they’re at risk of much. The game seems far more rigged in favor of corpos than 20 yrs ago. Can’t imagine how they could ever fall off at this point. Or, say a company like Netflix which I’m is using tons of algorithms…

              Wait a min. Isn’t AI now used as a catch all for any and all tech laymen don’t understand? Do you specifically mean llamas are being overhyped (had to leave the autocorrect version of LLMs)?

              Sorry, if I’m slow to the anti-AI party. It’s been hard figuring out what’s sensationalism, what’s contrarianism, and what’s legit nowadays (or maybe I’m just getting dumber :D)

              • rand_alpha19@moist.catsweat.com
                6·
                3 months ago

                The companies aren’t really at stake here, it’s the human cost and the devaluing of labour that’s my personal issue.

                I think it also makes it worse that people are being laid off to pay for “AI” (quotes because LLMs and ML in general are not actually real AI as understood by computer science, so yes I’m referring to LLMs here) technologies that literally require human intervention to function in the way they’re advertised to.

                A lot of these models output is tweaked by people in India (for example) that get paid shit wages to make sure that it didn’t spit out absolute useless gibberish or straight up wrong information. The low wages don’t really incentivize the worker to give a fuck, so at every level you’re basically going for the minimum viable product (MVP).

                Not a great foundation for the future of technology, in my opinion. These things will have to be actually useful in a practical way to not simply be a fad. Also, art theft and plagiarism are pretty real issues that are inherent to the implementation of the technology unless you only train a model on your own content, which a lot of people/companies straight up refuse to do.

                To refer back to another example of tech that was overhyped, blockchain technology has like, 1 real-life use case, and that’s really cool, but it’s not really an earth-shattering development despite every tech bro proselytizing about it like the second coming. Laying off productive workers to focus on it was a bad move in hindsight, an obvious one. I think that will apply here too.

                • Psychodelic@lemmy.world
                  2·
                  3 months ago

                  You’re makin great points!

                  I was actually just hearing about this Karla Ortiz copyright case. Sounds like it’s going to shine a big ol spotlight on how these systems work and how exactly they copy other people’s work.

                  I wonder if it could make things so prohibitively expensive it’s no longer worth investing in for most companies. At the very least, it hopefully gives artists/content creators some kind of legal protection

      • MyOpinion@lemm.ee
        142·
        3 months ago

        Copying everyone’s work and dumping out shitty versions of it. Using people behind the scenes to give your software the feel of having true intelligence. It is a con job.

        • Psychodelic@lemmy.world
          2·
          3 months ago

          Ah, gotcha. I totally agree in that case, but that also sounds like standard capitalism. lol. And that shit is going strong!

      • fine_sandy_bottom@lemmy.federate.cc
        8·
        3 months ago

        Companies involved in delivering AI solutions are over-selling it. In the long term it will produce much less value than investors have been led to believe. A hype train, if you will.

  • RagingRobot@lemmy.world
    50·
    3 months ago

    My company did this same thing like a week ago and the CEO was bragging about his leadership insight lol

    All the tech companies are doing this same shit. It’s just layoffs with an excuse so they don’t look as bad for their failures.

    What ai features do we really need from Cisco? None lol

    • Waldowal@lemmy.world
      38·
      3 months ago

      With AI based routing, the switches will use AI to read the destination IP, look it up in the routing table, and send the traffic there. It’s the same as it was before, but AI. Also, it will occasionally hallucinate and send your traffic to someone else.

      • skuzz@discuss.tchncs.de
        9·
        3 months ago

        All you gotta do to hack it, is challenge the AI to a round of tic-tac-toe (which for some reason confounds the models.)

    • cakeistheanswer@lemmy.dbzer0.com
      8·
      3 months ago

      Cisco has been clueless for awhile. The people who want speed don’t trust them to do basic network stacks, they want to do something more complicated?

      The HFT industry noticed Cisco was messing with routing stacks, and you can essentially look to the entire market cap of Arista as a direct result. Specifically people wanting to avoid the headaches of the nexus line (EOS is nice!).

      They are the victims of their own success to the point they long ago cannibalized actual product innovation. A lot of the industry still wants their certs, but nobody I know who values speed (local stripped back switches) or stability/availability (AWS and minimal office equipment) would chose them for much. A lot of the purchases are from big players with long contracts, the “Nobody got fired for IBM” of network equipment.

      This just screams moving deck chairs on the Titanic.

  • conditional_soup@lemm.ee
    34·
    3 months ago

    If I was a Cisco investor, I’d be looking to move my money elsewhere. All these companies laying people off, shuttering whole ass teams, and replacing them with non-proprietary and, frankly, unproven LLMs are going to blow their own legs off here pretty soon. I have a feeling that a pretty dramatic change is AI pricing models is coming soon, since all of these companies are providing access to their models for a fraction of the cost to run them, and the VCs are going to want their money back. Is chatGPT good enough at, what is it, 0.004 cents a token? Maybe, I guess, if the ghost of quality control doesn’t haunt you at night. Is chatGPT still good enough at 0.1 cents a token or more, or with surge pricing models? I sincerely doubt it. If openAI implements surge pricing, stay on the lookout for articles about some company or user getting a surprise bill for a million dollars, AWS-style. Given the current quality of LLMs, I don’t think that the cost shakes out for what you get.

    • Optional@lemmy.worldOP
      161·
      3 months ago

      Before we get to pricing, I’d like to see any successful use case in a corporate environment? Not one that’s sort-of working, or obe that hasn’t panned out yet - just a successful, implemented, customer-facing example.

      • conditional_soup@lemm.ee
        11·
        3 months ago

        Good point. I think a bigger problem than the customer facing AIs is going to be the internal ones that make shit up. Someone on here claimed to be working somewhere where they gutted their HR department and replaced them almost completely with an LLM that was fed their documents. They claimed the AI had already told them several blatantly illegal things. Any company that does that is just begging to get sued to death, and I’m sure the investors will be reeeeeaaaaal happy with the, what, 1% they saved by killing HR? I mean, HR aren’t the good guys here, but just imagine a company being brain dead enough to say “hey, let’s get rid of the people that keep us from getting sued to death and replace it with a chatbot lmao”.

        • ____@infosec.pub
          5·
          3 months ago

          And here I thought that outsourced “HR” folks were a travesty.

          Had a small payroll issue recently having to do with some time off and a misunderstanding by the (outsourced) HR folks, was able to speak with enough people who understood one segment or another of the (rather complex) scenario to get it resolved in a couple of days.

          AI would be a hard fail in that application, guaranteed.

        • Optional@lemmy.worldOP
          4·
          3 months ago

          IBM Plans To Replace Nearly 8,000 Jobs With AI — These Jobs Are First to Go

          IBM CEO Arvind Krishna announced a hiring pause in May, but that’s not all. Later that month, the CEO also stated the company plans to replace nearly 8,000 jobs with AI.

          Krishna noted that back-office functions, specifically in the human resources (HR) sector, will be the first to face these changes. In recent weeks, the company has opened up dozens of positions for AI-based roles to help develop and maintain these systems.

          Now that I think about it - that explains a few things . . .

      • ____@infosec.pub
        3·
        3 months ago

        At least one giant multi-national corp is actively soliciting examples and use cases from their employees.

        “Toy” example submissions is fine, the company is just so eager for something to do with AI - they’re hoping for their actual AI folks to be able to take off of that uncompensated IP, while the employee with the idea gets a pat on the head.

        Have I had ideas I might otherwise submit and that are well within my capabilities to implement at “toy” level? Hell, yes.

        Do I want to contribute concepts into that sort of pipeline? Absolutely not. Not when they more or less automatically own my work product and whatever I do on company time already.

  • Yawweee877h444@lemmy.world
    13·
    3 months ago

    Good. Let AI take all jobs ASAP.

    Because then we redistribute the wealth and we don’t have to work and can just play and be freeeeee!

    Right?

    Guys…?

  • FirstCircle@lemmy.mlEnglish
    8·
    3 months ago

    Davidson will move to a role advising the CEO during the borg

    What does the borg have to do with this?

    • fine_sandy_bottom@lemmy.federate.cc
      2·
      3 months ago

      The whole article is a shit show. When did it become trendy to use abbreviations like “reorg” and “biz”. I work in corporate finance, I’ve never heard someone talk like that.

      • FirstCircle@lemmy.mlEnglish
        1·
        3 months ago

        The redundancies follow declining revenues and shrinking profits.

        “Redundancies” is apparently now a noun that refers to employees being laid off.

        Intel announced it was eliminating 16,000 people – to curb capital expenses.

        Headcount is now a physical asset I guess. Corps must be taking depreciation expenses on employees now in addition to salary expenses. Ka-ching!

        After my first browse of the article I was wondering if it had been spewed out by some of the crappy AI that Cisco is so keen on.