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Re:Dropbox to reduce global workforce by about 16%, or 500 s... by AJRF on Thursday April 27, 2023 @10:16AM (#35728435)
"These transitions are never easy, but I’m determined to ensure that Dropbox is at the forefront of the AI era, just as we were at the forefront of the shift to mobile and the cloud. We’ll need all hands on deck as machine intelligence gives us the tools to reimagine our existing businesses and invent new ones. And I'm committed to doing everything in my power to best position ourselves for the future and unlock our full potential."

What has AI got to do with me putting my files in the cloud so I can sync them across my devices?

Re:Dropbox to reduce global workforce by about 16%, or 500 s... by CharlesW on Thursday April 27, 2023 @10:38AM (#35728838)
Dropbox is a place where people put data. AI is built on data. A simple use case is something along the lines of, "Put all of your technical documentation in Folder X, then deploy Folder X as a Generative AI chatbot you can ask questions to".
Re:Dropbox to reduce global workforce by about 16%, or 500 s... by LightHugger on Thursday April 27, 2023 @10:32AM (#35728718)
They will use AI to scan your files so that they can do things with the resulting harvested data.
Re:Dropbox to reduce global workforce by about 16%, or 500 s... by samstave on Thursday April 27, 2023 @11:21AM (#35729480)
EXACTLY

AI is allowing for massive monitization of what was previously "flat file" style data.

Dropbox, as I mentioned, has always 'not been you friend' - now they are just a more powerful 'not your friend'.

Re:Dropbox to reduce global workforce by about 16%, or 500 s... by Obscurity4340 on Thursday April 27, 2023 @11:40PM (#35737236)
That's why there's Cryptomator
Re:Dropbox to reduce global workforce by about 16%, or 500 s... by pokstad on Thursday April 27, 2023 @10:33AM (#35728733)
Probably advanced Q&A chatbot trained on your company’s documents. Imagine how that could improve onboarding if you can ask AI how things work in your company.
Re:Dropbox to reduce global workforce by about 16%, or 500 s... by thegginthesky on Thursday April 27, 2023 @10:43AM (#35728903)
I'd love to be able to ask questions about technical documentation, code bases, contract PDFs and so on, without having to worry to send my data unprotected to another company that doesn't have a Enterprise contract or can assure us of SOC 2 compliance.

If the AI can interpret what I mean, find the file, link me to the sources and distill the information and context, it will be major productivity boom.

Re:Dropbox to reduce global workforce by about 16%, or 500 s... by ramraj07 on Thursday April 27, 2023 @11:13AM (#35729371)
I’d love to be able to just ask dropbox what my passport number is, or to find the file my auditor gave me last year with recommendations.
Re:Dropbox to reduce global workforce by about 16%, or 500 s... by Thrymr on Thursday April 27, 2023 @11:38AM (#35729708)
Do you think the ability to recall private information like that will more valuable to you, the user, or to data aggregators, advertisers, and service providers? Is there enough extra revenue in expanding services to Dropbox users, or will they inevitably become another data scraping company (perhaps with a veneer of "anonymization" to supposedly protect your privacy)?
Re:Dropbox to reduce global workforce by about 16%, or 500 s... by ramraj07 on Thursday April 27, 2023 @11:49AM (#35729886)
As of now I trust Dropbox not to use my information or sell it to anyone else. In fact I pay them pretty penny not to. Is there any evidence that they’re violating that assumption?
Re:Dropbox to reduce global workforce by about 16%, or 500 s... by swsieber on Thursday April 27, 2023 @01:07PM (#35731221)
There is in face public evidence that they take good care of data, even when building an in house OCR engine, https://dropbox.tech/machine-learning/creating-a-modern-ocr-... :

> We began by collecting a representative set of donated document images that match what users might upload, such as receipts, invoices, letters, etc. To gather this set, we asked a small percentage of users whether they would donate some of their image files for us to improve our algorithms. At Dropbox, we take user privacy very seriously and thus made it clear that this was completely optional, and if donated, the files would be kept private and secure. We use a wide variety of safety precautions with such user-donated data, including never keeping donated data on local machines in permanent storage, maintaining extensive auditing, requiring strong authentication to access any of it, and more.

Re:Dropbox to reduce global workforce by about 16%, or 500 s... by yadascript on Thursday April 27, 2023 @11:40AM (#35729738)
Would you use the passport number without double checking it ?
Re:Dropbox to reduce global workforce by about 16%, or 500 s... by ramraj07 on Thursday April 27, 2023 @03:50PM (#35733620)
If it looks mostly correct, yes.
Re:Dropbox to reduce global workforce by about 16%, or 500 s... by roncesvalles on Thursday April 27, 2023 @11:53AM (#35729943)
I can get my passport number by pressing the Windows key, typing "passport" and pressing Enter. I don't know if I'd want AI to come into the mix, or even Dropbox for that matter.

There is no substitute for being organized.

Re:Dropbox to reduce global workforce by about 16%, or 500 s... by ramraj07 on Thursday April 27, 2023 @03:49PM (#35733617)
There is absolutely a substitute for being organized :) ask me how! Dropbox plays a big role in it ever since it started indexing pdf contents.
Re:Dropbox to reduce global workforce by about 16%, or 500 s... by malyk on Thursday April 27, 2023 @02:23PM (#35732457)
if it's in your iphone photos library you can just type "passport" and then copy/paste the number out of the image.
Re:Dropbox to reduce global workforce by about 16%, or 500 s... by varenc on Thursday April 27, 2023 @12:36PM (#35730693)
I believe nowadays most of Dropbox's revenue comes from their Dropbox Business customers. Or at the very least they see growth in business customer revenue as much more promising. (from my glancing over their SEC filings)

So while as a personal user you might not see many potentials for AI (though I do), I'm sure there's huge opportunities for their business customers. Also if you look at their current offerings you can see they've branched out substantially from just storing files. Signatures, "DocSend", password vaults, etc.