After anthropic lost $1.5 bill for pirating books they decided to pull a google and manually scan every book ever written. The number of people needed to gather the data they need is probably massive.
reply- Cross-platform desktop apps
- Cross-platform mobile apps
- Claude Code TUI
- Product-specific verticals like Claude Design
- Corporate marketing website
- APIs
- Writing technical documentation for APIs
- Enterprise support
- And what must be a massive infra team to run training and inference at scale in a heterogeneous cloud environment
replyAnd I’m sure more than that. But there’s obviously plenty to work on, and they’re not at the point they can just Claude their way through it.
I'm kinda curious about this too. But then I'm always amazed at the enormous workforces these tech companies have, and I'm sure they cut them as thin as they can. Like adobe has 30,000 employees & some blogger estimated that 1/3rd of their workers are actually working on their software. I use their software sometimes and I really haven't noticed many changes to it over the years, except recently with the ai stuff. Like from 2015-2020 I can't think of any major things they added to adobe illustrator. I guess making and maintaining software is hard.
replyI fully agree most big tech companies are pretty bloated. But FWIW a lot of my time at SaaS companies, especially in the B2B space, was spend working on features for larger customers that most others would never use or even see. Like, yeah, product X isn't that complex, but $BigCorp wants to use it in their private cloud, or needs it to be single tenant, or needs these audits done, or want their $Gov client to use it. Now you have a ton of work for zero visible changes.
replyGood point. I'm sure a lot of the work adobe was doing between 2015-2020 involved moving to the cloud and stuff like that which I just never interacted with, and cloud stuff probably has a lot of B2B work. Plus during that time the value of their stock grew like 500% with an ATH at 700%!! They were kicking ass! Probably, to justify their growth they had all kinds of projects they were working on, some of which never saw the light of day, others which grew new parts of the company like Adobe Dimension.
replyEven at companies that appear super bloated I don't think people are idle, its just that mantaining stuff is a lot of work, projects get cancelled, and, like you said they do a lot of specialty work for big clients.
I'd guess they have a lot of internally facing tooling for monitoring, one-shot eval to catch people prompting bad things, etc. That stuff can probably be yolo'd and it just annoys the internal teams using it.
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