As you may have heard Uber is cutting 3000 additional jobs, closing 45 offices, and reevaluating many of it's bets. One thing that stood out to the Artificial Intelligence community is the statement that Uber doesn't think AI research is core part of their business.
"As part of the latest changes, Uber will scale back on noncore businesses. Mr. Khosrowshahi said the company is winding down its product incubator and artificial-intelligence lab, and exploring “strategic alternatives” for Uber Works, which pairs prospective employers with gig workers."
Source: https://www.wsj.com/articles/uber-cuts-3-000-more-jobs-shuts-45-offices-in-coronavirus-crunch-11589814608?redirect=amp#click=https://t.co/J9owqvEdjV
Do you think this is a precursor that we're living in an era of overhyped promises about what AI can deliver? Are AI science team more expendable than engineering teams?
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comments
- Your suggestion that this article can be a proof of AI hype is somewhat cherry picked.
- There is a wide misunderstanding of what can be achieved with data, and many marketers ride the "AI hype", which pisses off dedicated researchers who now have to compete with garbage research work flooding the field and creating just noise and damage.
- It's easy to build *something* with AI (e.g. image classifier - just fork from GitHub!), but requires much more to solve a *specific* data dependent problem and deploy a probabilistic solution that can reliably cover unseen cases as well. Very different from engineering, heavy maths foundations are crucial.
- Startups and companies that build effective ML solutions can solve an entirely new realm of problems at scale. There is a tangible and irreplaceable value from some AI applications.
- What indeed stinks is companies insisting on using AI even when unnecessary. You see miserable graduates forcefully applying decision trees to business problems that aren't properly defined or can't scale, just to have their managers' satisfactory boasting to use AI.
If you're looking for more opinions (addressing mostly Uber researchers and false promises of autonomous drivers) check reddit:
https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/gm80x2/n_uber_to_cut_3000_jobs_including_rollbacks_on_ai/
However, my comment is simply related to Uber's woes in the current climate and why it is faring worse than any other tech company of its stature. This seems to me like a lay-off parade being conducted to distract people from the core issues at the company and the CEO's inability to stabilize the ship. It is an excuse to secure the CEO role at the cost of those who've built the product and the company from the ground up, way before this CEO came on board, which is simply unacceptable and immoral. I am not a fan of Travis Kalanick but I can vouch for the fact that he being the one who founded this company had a solid vision and an idea as to where it's headed which the current leadership seems to be lacking entirely.
After all, why does Google Search need so many people, it's just ranking websites and selling ads? I read a paper on it once, so it sounds pretty solved to me...
But AI is still hyped in general. No one is making money out of pure play AI but the big guys.