bdbarone.bsky.social

In an apparent race for the future, why would *any* AI-focused companies laying people off? Meta, Microsoft, Google — surely, if AI is an existential threat it'd be all-hands on deck, right?

And yes, they did layoff people useful in the 'war': engineers, content designers, product designers, PMs.

There's no way even 50 geniuses working 24/7 could create a "fine-tuned" model (so are they tuning an established model?) that beats Sonnet 4, GPT5 or G2.5+. They're still tying their shoes after the race has already begun. Source: I worked on training and evals at Google (Bard->Gemini).

A lot of folks are dunking on you, and it's unfair. Their point is valid: drug dealers don't give away free stuff to get you hooked.

The deeper point is that AI products aren't sticky. ChatGPT boasts 500m weekly actives... but only 15m subscribe. That's not what a sticky product looks like