Viewing a single comment thread. View all comments

Screye t1_ivzcjb3 wrote

Big companies are firing more non-essential members of the team. Also, research & unreliable money makers get cut first.

So it makes sense that SWEs don't get fired because they maintain the systems. On the other hand, a lot of AI products are not making a shit ton of money just yet, the research costs are very high and the AI Scientists don't usually do the job of maintaining an AI service.
So they get fired with a higher priority than SWEs.

Now, in a downturn, cost cutting takes major priority.

  1. AI tools allow expensive humans to be replaced with cheaper algorithms
  2. 3rd party startups can sell their AI toolkit for lower prices than Azure AI / Google AI
  3. If you didn't expect the startup to make money for 3-5 years anyway, then the market conditions don't really matter that much
  4. All other startup industries are in the dumpster. Gig economy startups burn too much money. End users stop using convenience based startups in times of high inflation. And don't even get me started on crypto. So really, health-tech and ML are the only 2 startup sectors where it still makes some sense to invest.

Those 4 things have made it a rather decent time to be in an ML startup, but not so great time to be in ML at a bigtech company.

22

bumbo-pa t1_ivzrcdd wrote

3: Yeah but you gotta raise muney. Muney harder to raise in tough markets.

2

Screye t1_ivzs8xs wrote

AFAIK, There aren't a lot of series A or seed rounds happening.

But pre-established startups like Jasper are getting funded because premier investors have already invested a ton into them. In for a penny, in for a pound.

3

AchillesDev t1_iw2lz53 wrote

Overall volume is down but deals are happening. My company just closed our series A and later stage VCs with money to deploy are retreating to earlier stages like seed and series A.

3