Home > News

AI to Blame as Dropbox Cuts 500 Jobs

By Charlie Fripp
Ai

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been thrust into the public domain over the last few months, with platforms such as ChatGPT seemingly faster and more accurate than humans. While there’s always a fear that AI can replace workers, the file-sharing platform Dropbox blamed AI for reducing its workforce.

FYI: looking to save your Facebook memories? Learn how to transfer Facebook photos to Dropbox and Google Photos.

Times Are Changing

Dropbox started four years before Google rolled out its Google Drive rival in 2012. It quickly became one of the most popular file-sharing hosts, providing users with an online space to store their data. But in a “difficult” blog post to staff, CEO Drew Houston said that it’s cutting Dropbox’s workforce by 500 people.

File Sharing
Image source: Pexels

One of the reasons Houston gave for the 16 percent reduction is AI. In essence, Dropbox realizes that AI-powered systems will be able to deliver “new superpowers and completely transform knowledge work,” but not everybody is in a suitable role.

That means as Dropbox shifts its focus to incorporate AI into the file-sharing space, the skills of some workers are redundant. Development is also hastened to stay ahead of the competition, which Houston says has “the same opportunities.”

Difficult Decisions

Most companies would attempt to shift redundant workers to a different team, but Dropbox has seemingly exhausted all avenues to retain the affected staff. “Our next growth stage requires a different mix of skill sets, particularly in AI and early-stage product development. We’ve been bringing in great talent in these areas over the last couple of years, and we’ll need even more,” Houston said in the blog post.

Another reason for the layoffs, according to the CEO, is that Dropbox’s growth has slowed. This is seemingly a combination of a saturated file-sharing market and users cutting unnecessary expenses.

Dropbox provides individual users with 2GB of online storage for free on the Basic plan, and that can be expanded to 2TB with the Plus plan for $10 a month. This is in contrast to Google Drive, which is free for 15GB of cloud-based storage.

Image credit: Pexels

Subscribe to our newsletter!

Our latest tutorials delivered straight to your inbox

Charlie Fripp Avatar
Charlie Fripp
Charlie Fripp is a technology writer with a strong focus on consumer gadgets, video games, and cyber security. He holds an undergraduate degree in professional journalism and has worked as a journalist for over 15 years. In his spare time, he enjoys playing various musical instruments and gardening.

Read next

Octopuses possess roughly 500 million neurons distributed across their body, with two-thirds located in their arms rather than their central brain, meaning each arm can taste, problem-solve, and react to stimuli independently of whatever the octopus is otherwise paying attention to.
Explore the historic Roman bridge in lush Salamanca, Spain captured beautifully in daylight.
The Roman aqueduct at Segovia, built around the first century AD without mortar, still carried water into the 1970s, its 167 granite arches held together by nothing but the precise weight distribution of stones cut to fit each other within fractions of a millimeter.
When the SS Great Eastern laid the first working transatlantic telegraph cable in 1866, a message that had taken ten days by steamship suddenly crossed the ocean in minutes, and the financial markets of London and New York were forced, within a single trading week, to invent the modern concept of synchronised global price.
From below of blue starry sky over radio telescope and trees with leaves
The Big Ear telescope was scanning at 1420.4056 megahertz on the night of 15 August 1977, the exact frequency at which hydrogen atoms vibrate across the universe, because Giuseppe Cocconi and Philip Morrison had argued years earlier that any species trying to be found would broadcast on that channel — and then, for 72 seconds, something did.
In 2016, archaeologists dated two rings of snapped stalagmites in France’s Bruniquel Cave to 176,500 years ago, evidence that Neanderthals had walked 336 metres into darkness with fire and built architecture deep underground long before modern humans reached Europe
Otto von Bismarck was 74 when Germany adopted the world’s first national old-age social insurance program in 1889, setting the pension age at 70 after years of fighting socialists with bans, laws, and a promise few workers would live long enough to use
When cosmonaut Valeri Polyakov stepped out of his Soyuz capsule in March 1995 after 437 consecutive days aboard Mir, doctors recorded him at several centimetres above his pre-flight height, and his spine had become so unaccustomed to gravity that the recovery team carried him to a chair rather than risk the compression of letting him walk.
When Bell Labs engineer Karl Jansky pointed a rotating antenna at the sky in 1932 looking for sources of transatlantic radio static, he kept picking up a faint hiss that peaked every 23 hours and 56 minutes, and he eventually realized he had become the first human to hear the center of the Milky Way.