She sounds like a loser, I feel bad for her kid.
Fuckin half wit, no wonder CEO’s love AI, dumb as bricks
I don’t understand why people are still taking this woman seriously. She is not a ‘girlboss’. She is the woman who ran Yahoo into the ground, taking it from one of the giants of the dot com era into a largely worthless and useless has-been by grossly mismanaging every single one of their formerly valuable properties.
The fact that she is involved immediately makes this company lose credibility in my eyes.
The fact that she apparently needs an AI model to come up with three compliments for her own daughter only reinforces my opinion.
She is the woman who ran Yahoo into the ground, taking it from one of the giants of the dot com era into a largely worthless and useless has-been
Yahoo was once a big recognizable brand, but there was pretty much no moment in history when anyone would have said “Oh no, Yahoo is down, now how will I get important things done?” It was never focused, it was never indispensable.
Yahoo was valued at over $100B briefly in 1999-2000, after Google had demonstrated a much, much better internet search. Yahoo cratered to as little as 5% of its all-time high, recovered for a while, then began fading away. Its market cap was just under $20B when Mayer was hired in 2012. After which the market cap trended up.
She is the woman who ran Yahoo into the ground
Was Yahoo doing that well in 2012? At the time people were saying that she would never have gotten the job if Yahoo wasn’t a sinking ship
Look at Google as an example. Google started as a search engine and ad company, and has since reinvented itself with investment in new areas like photos, email, Android, etc.
Yahoo started as a search engine, ad company, ‘portal start page’, and email. They kept doing the same old thing and went nowhere.
But they still had products with value- Flickr for example. Managing photos was starting to become a big thing, but they let Flickr stagnate, it got no development, and eventually people stopped using it. Look at their email product as another- Gmail focused on making their email usable, clean, fast, great storage, and without lock-in. Yahoo email sucked and it was hard to get rid of them because for a long time they didn’t support IMAP (what you’d use to vacuum out your old messages) or email forwarding. People stayed not because it was a great product, but because they were stuck. But that’s a real missed opportunity- Yahoo Mail could have been what Gmail became.
When Google modernized their site with web 2.0 technologies like AJAX and updated the look and feel to match, Yahoo still felt like a Web 1.0 site with ads all over the place and messy design.
That’s why I say she ran the company into the ground. Just because Yahoo wasn’t leading the pack when she joined doesn’t mean there weren’t any wins to be had. It’s the job of CEO to recognize where the company should invest and innovate and where they should stay the course.
Another example- one of her big decisions was ending all remote work for Yahoo employees, without consideration for employees that didn’t live near a Yahoo office, or even how much office space Yahoo had. I remember reports of people working in hallways and sitting on the floor because there weren’t enough desks for everybody that was forced to come in.
To be clear- I’m NOT saying she’s stupid. She’s obviously very smart. But I am saying she wasn’t a good leader, and made many decisions that were obviously wrong both at the time and as seen historically. She does not seem to be a person with good business sense or the right kind of leadership, for a great many reasons.
She probably “extracted value” for shareholders of a dying company. This usually means picking the company apart, selling things, firing people, and offshoring labor.
IMO, every time a CEO, bigshot capitalist, or industrialist is cited as a “hero”, I try to keep in mind they are not our hero.
I largely agree with you, though by the time she took the reigns at yahoo, it was already pretty dead.
But this pattern of executives proudly offloading ‘pesky personal connection’ to AI just works to confirm that their stratum of society are almost exclusively sociopaths.
Opposition is the easiest fucking job in the world
Somebody get that kid outta there!
This woman’s bad decisions brought down an Internet giant and yet she’s still treated as if she is someone worth listening to.
hey now, she was paid quite well for that work, over $200m.
Dhe was paid to do a job and, since shes stilñ there, i guews she is doing the job well
The job simply wasn’t “make yahoo something big and successful”
I genuinely don’t understand people like this who are so averse to thinking that they go out of their way to prompt a language model to get an answer that they should’ve known already.
People in my life say I think to much despite the fact I’m naturally a deep thinker, quick is disappointing to hear from them because I know they use LLMs for “research”, which really means to ask tops 3 questions and think you’re informed.
Well hey, at least the rich can be unthinking dumbasses too
This is dystopian as hell.
I kind of like that the article points out a problem with a lot of stuff that is implemented on us:
Like, did we think about this for more than a second?
When you have no idea how to parent specifically because you’re a fucking monster.
if anything, it shows Mayer performing the exact kind of cognitive offloading that any AI tool worth its salt should free us up to focus on rather than doing for us.
This has been the focus from the start, though. Almost all of the “killer apps” for AI that we’re being sold by the AI companies are about doing the creative stuff and human interaction for us. So we can spend more time being depressed, mindless worker drones, I guess?
I’d love for an AI to chit-chat with my co-workers and fluff my boss so I could just do my work and go home.
“Cognitive offloading” may well be the words that doom the human race to our Idiocrasy future
The words aren’t what doom us, the phenomenon they describe is. Without the words, we remain in ignorance, which compounds with the thoughtlessness.
Conversely, putting words to it gives the mind something to work on.
“Cognitive offloading” == “lobotomy”
🍆💨 uuh mmm yeah!
It’s cognitive too, right?
Had to input what the nanny told her about her kid.
This feels a bit like an ad for dazzle.
Because it is. She’s fully capable of coming up with three superlatives about her child, but she’d rather use her kid as a prop in a sales pitch.
She’s fully capable of coming up with three superlatives about her child
You may underestimate how much of a sociopath these people are…
Sociopaths are usually great at superlatives; flattering people is one of the easiest ways to manipulate them
hey google why do i love my children
“This is an interesting question, why do you love your children?”
“omg it’s sentient”
Gork, is this true?
You made me imagine a Gorn AI. It doesn’t answer your questions it just keeps trying to fight you to the death.
You should probably keep grok away from your kids.
Mork, where is Mindy?
Instead of typing a prompt and getting a response, Dazzle has users snap a photo as the starting point and lets the agent point to what it thinks the next course of action should be. “Snap a picture of a purchase you’ve been thinking about, a flat tire, or fridge ingredients, and Dazzle buys on approval, schedules repairs, or suggests recipes,” the company says.
Finally, what we really needed: ChatGPT for people too lazy to type a prompt
Snaps a picture of their daughter, what’s it supposed do without input at that point? Just start making up critiques? “Well she doesn’t have a flat tire but her hair cut is terrible, her features don’t match societies preferences so she could use a nose job, the fact that she’s not smiling tells me she could use a doctor’s visit to diagnose depression medications”
“On second thought there aren’t 3 good things about your daughter”
See! That’s what I’ve been trying to tell her!!!
How long before someone mates this with a drone to basically become Jafar and lose their fucking mind
These people are so out of touch
It’s really interesting thinking about what changed in tech and why all the leaders are like this. It used to be people developing and fitting technology to goals - mapping the world, enabling democratic power or niche hobby relationships - and that generally ended up being exciting and helpful.
But at some point tech became captured by a few specific ideas and technology - SaaS, AI, data mining - and every CEO now tries to fit the goals to the technology. It no longer matters to these people what the benefit to the user is, they just work backwards from what the technology can do and rationalize whatever it is as the goal.
From what I’ve seen in Startups both during the 90s and more recently, the spirit in them changed from “solve a cool problem” in the 90s to “find a way to make lots of money for founders” after the Net Crash and more often than not the chosen way to make money was sell the company to investors rather than actually selling anything to customers, so the tech just needed to look like “the next big money maker” in order to get said investor money and “tech” messaging became dominated by investor hype.
The almost pure-grifer incentives and spirit I saw become dominant in Startups from the 00s now seems to pervade the whole Tech industry.
Pretty much. The industry was for ‘those nerds’ in the days, then dot-com came and holy shit, money to be made, but for a time, let the nerds cook because the investor class had no idea and kind of knew they had no idea.
Then the crash put the investor class firmly at the wheel and the industry has been significantly distorted since then, motivation wise.
Clearly good things have happened, but there’s always this anti-user angle at play now.
