Thread regarding Cisco Systems Inc. layoffs

@OP+1jjt0z5m8

@r7 did you even read the links? Cisco themselves is stating the optional storage model (why???), inference-only pods, not being part of nvidia's reference architecture. Not FUD if the company is outright admitting this idiocy.

Kind of obvious a bunch of disgruntled LR'd ex-Cisco employees rambling.

All aboard the FUD train choo chooooo

So let me get this straight: pods are useless, a glorified love letter to nvidia. Hype Shield is vaporware. Hype Fabric isn't even actually advertised, so it couldn't even earn the dishonorable title of vaporware. The one place where LLMs could actually be leveraged in management and control plane isn't happening due to institutional incompetence. This sounds on brand, to be honest.

A lot of doubt about the “AI Winter” but the level of hype and investment (in today’s numbers) was about equal in the first two AI Winters.

The AGI promise is complete hype. LLMs have hit a wall.
The ridiculously high valuations that AI companies have in relation to their earnings reeks of Dot Com.

Top 20? Couldn't even make the "soft" top 100.

https://time.com/collection/time100-ai-2024/

Mention AI to anyone in the world of IT they’ll mention Nvidia, Microsoft and Apple. Cisco wouldn’t even make the top 20. Just like they aren’t with cloud. Nontechnical ELT and sycophantic “yes sir” senior management asleep at the wheel. They’ve missed every tech transition in the last fifteen years. And they’ll miss every one in the future too.

disagree on the AI winter. But CIsco holding an „AI Summit“ is telling. No AI company needs to hold an AI summit. Only those who have nothing to do with it. I get that Cisco tries to stay relevant but it should be done with innovation and GTM, not with announcements and discussions. Poor folks in Marketing who have to invent all that

Same as birth of the internet in the last century. It will have a similar reset.

Cisco has nothing to do with AI. We don’t understand the basics. Lots of revenue being raked on out there, little by Cisco. Cheerleading will not help.

Ahhh, can’t agree on AI winter, but can definitely agree on Cisco’s place in the AI infrastructure market. Non-existent. The company will miss this transition just like they did with Cloud. One of these “brilliant” products - AI Pods, Hyperfabric, AI defense - take your pick - will become the next intercloud. So Cisco will fade away into irrelevance once again, but other companies will ki-l it with AI for the next 5-10 years. Have to find one of those companies to work for.

Didn't some exec, F, publicly claim Cisco would run Tbps of encrypted traffic through Gpt4 to "AI all the traffic and can haz cheeseburger to profit"?

If it were in print I know many Cisco Principal Engineers who would plagiarize that quote into white papers as their own idea. Given that scaling is more the purview of the technical and not executive ranks which is the bigger problem for Cisco effectively innovating?

They keep cheerleading about AI and we are all supposed to be so excited about becoming even more easily expendable from it.

Well, what about data plane if management and control plane are things Cisco can't deliver on? Didn't some exec, F, publicly claim Cisco would run Tbps of encrypted traffic through Gpt4 to "AI all the traffic and can haz cheeseburger to profit"? Never mind the sheer volume/sec would overrun all the CUDA cores in the world if one attempted to inference against the data, or the fact that it's encrypted.

Networking is going nowhere. Arista, Fortinet and others are getting out of the business. Cisco has proven "none of these technologies are providing sustainable revenue, nor will they" with significant drops in year over year revenue and earnings numbers.

Like networking AI has been around for ages doing useful niche work and it's only reaching the point where it might be viable in the mainstream. One could write an encyclopedia of failed networking technologies but at the end of the day networking changed the way the world works for the better and the worse, and now that there is money and attention on AI it will fork out into a large number of mostly failed branches but the the few that succeed will continue to change the world for the better and the worse.

The place where networking and AI seem to combine is on the network management side which Cisco has been notoriously bad at for decades.

"Just because you say 'AI' 40 times in a conference call, doesn't mean you're an AI player." -Dan Ives (https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=zvNDlsJmIi0).

Competent companies are making bank on this tech. We were able to shelve two operations in Chennai and one in Hyderabad since copilot produced better unit tests than our contractors. We've eliminated the need for junior and intermediate engineers in the US and Mexico as well. This tech is oversold/hyped in general, yes, but competent leaders are tidying up quite nicely. He-l, we've even scooped up a coupled talented security folks from Cisco. Not sure what the he-l is going on over there, but it sounds like your leaders like to abuse ethical and competent staff.

What exactly is Cisco's AI play? Buy nvidia chips and put them in overpriced blade servers that can only inference, but not actually train?????!?!? Can't even be invited to be part of nvidia's reference architecture. https://blocksandfiles.com/2024/11/01/cisco-not-included-in-nvidia-ai-enterprise-reference-architecture/

Do the servers also have DNA licensing or shut down unless you have some meraki-like annual paid subscription? That's just taking COTS gpus and making them worse.

So what is this? Just more nvidia simping and name dropping? Looks like the corporate equivalent of unrequited love with Cisco buying up gpus and nvidia not even acknowledging Cisco's existence. Very cringe.

Largest startup mates.

"Was this breathless screed written by AI?"

Read it again and imagine an LLM writing with such precision and accuracy.

OP speaks the truth.

Was this breathless screed written by AI?