I guess they don’t see it as their core business so why not win some goodwill and dilute the moats of their competitors who are more leaned into the current AI hype cycle
I suspect that they are not genuinely pursuing AI as a business, but as a means to advertise their brand in order to sell their more conventional services.
Exactly. They want to have AI as a service. If any startup could do it's own AI on the cheap, this would not be possible (or at least not so profitable). They don't mind having other big competitors, they think they can win over big competitors with their marketing and first mover advantage.
Because the business costs don't scale well unless they can invent technology to remove the humans and for harder ML problems that currently isn't possible. The business is only based on being able to sell they hype of "AI" to investors.
I think it's that they intend to make AI into a product that can be sold, as compared to e.g. Google or other companies which develop AI internally but only use it to augment their existing portfolio of products.
Trying to regain some relevance in a world that has largely moved on from caring about it's core product and the added flop of the 'metaverse'. Without doing things like this they won't be able to compete with the large number of AI/ML startups in hiring space either.
It's a big PR bump, can you even remember the last time someone said something positive about that company? For me I think it would be easily more than 10 years ago.
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