Had a friend in AI/ML whose contract was extended until early 2026 get notified yesterday that today would be his last day, and also had another team member get let go today as well.
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hahaha! You make it so Confluence search works and I will be AMAZED... This simple statement shows you work there or did. If you know you know
Better yet... Zero, literally the worst search engine since well I dunno... any terrible search engine of the past.
@tt+1jw06bytq
“once they have matured enough, buy one from a solid company.”
That’s exactly what we did with machine learning, and again with blockchain, and I’m sure we’re already in talks to spend another half billion buying some AI startup that sold our leadership on functionality that is closer to the “dream” stage than “developed”.
If they want to pull a Twitter they should pull a Twitter. We have large parts of the company that have started pretending we’re a tech company instead of a shoe company. But AI is no Wunderwaffe. Microsoft’s engineers are unable to make it work the way accounting & HR want. OpenAI is unable to convert free users into paid subscribers (hint hint, in the real world people have learned it’s a toy not a tool). If the industry leaders are failing to implement and failing financially why are we wasting money we don’t have attempting to replicate their failure?
Sure. Video and image creation has gotten much better. Scary good. Consumers also HATE it with a visceral passion. It’s inauthentic, inhuman. If we use that it’ll be Sweatshops 2.0
The one good thing AI could do is ingest our massive documentation space, weighting information for staleness, to try & solve Confluence’s industry trailing search experience. AI isn’t needed here per-say but it would be an effective bandaid. It would also be a massive security & intellectual property risk, the biggest in Nike’s existence.
We’ve spent long enough dreaming. We need to be practical. We need product to refocus on making, marketing, selling, and shipping athletic apparel. That’s it.
I'm somewhere in between nb+ and nf+ on this one. Paraphrased nb+ is "AI is useless and a money pit". nf+ is "the time isn't here yet but it's got potential for specific use cases".
Comically you are both right. (my $.02)
One thing is for sure that was called out... Nike is a retail company, burning money developing tech to get ahead with a pile of contractors at $300 an hour isn't the way.
The solutions are near, once they have matured enough, buy one from a solid company.
I'm a coder and still find stackexchange to be faster for some esoteric questions and AI good for generating template code I can change. Or even giving me a direction maybe I hadn't thought of yet. But chatgpt/claude are still a struggle getting solid code from for some work. They hallucinate fairly hard generating code for me "this will work for sure" even after I say "nope that doesn't work". So it's barely worth using yet. Good ROI just... not... quite.
Stackexchange wins this one for now.
All this aside, tl;dr the AI industry has convinced the worlds CEO's that AI means you don't need as many employees which is a sad thing and hey look at the website we are on.
Naturally, I won’t be citing specific cases here. This forum is clearly monitored by HR, and I’m not about to jeopardize my livelihood for a debate with a stranger online. Your response focuses on how developing this technology is unwise—which, to be clear, I actually agree with. It is premature to build at this stage. However, dismissing its potential uses beyond writing product blurbs or transcribing audio reflects a truly limited perspective. The applications are far broader than that and I have seen it. I have no reason to lie.
@h3 I do not subscribe to your religion and note that you haven’t given any actual examples.
Our AI designed product was generic and derivative.
Builder.ai has already gone bankrupt. OpenAI is insolvent and loses money on every subscription tier (even the $200 one). It has <1 year to become profitable before the pyramid of contracts implodes taking out SoftBank, Microsoft, Oracle, a few blockchain startups turned datacenter, and a chunk of Nvidia.
Unless Nike is running an AI botnet across social media there is very little value the company will find generating a flood of mediocre content.
Nike has burned BILLIONS chasing machine learning, then blockchain, then AI. NONE of these ventures have earned more than they cost the company. The trend followers leading our company are nothing but lemmings.
@fz+1jw06bytq that just means you are poorly informed and lacking imagination. It’s already being used in many applications different from what you’ve described. However you are correct that buying (not building) is the appropriate choice here.
Wonder if that’s a sign we will be backing off AI. It’s entirely unnecessary for a business-to-business wholesaler.
And the “it will replace software engineers” is a hollow sales pitch for more investor funding (here’s an overview of microsoft’s own failure to implement in the dotnet codebase https://techbullion.com/ai-hype-vs-reality-in-software-development/).
Outside meeting transcription and drafting product copy I can’t think of a single business use for AI at Nike (that would actually work outside a startup salesman’s dreams).
This is happening in a lot of places. Seems to be mainly the in-person contracts or at least US based contracts. All of them are having 5/31 be their last day. But yet lots of teams have clearance for hiring near shore contractors (more cost effective)
Do you know which team? So they didn’t even give two weeks for transition?