Another Tech Fiasco: PlanetScale, and the State of GenAI

This year, for tech companies large and small, the trend is towards increased profitability at all costs. This is in part due to clients demanding ROI, and investor concerns. As a result, layoffs continue unabating. Finding a job is harder than ever. VCs went through rounds of bad deals; getting funded is now more difficult.

It also creates new opportunities: less competition for self-funded startups that don't depend on shareholder decisions, and offer faster, lightweight, non-hallucinating products that need much less cloud and GPU time (thus, much cheaper). In my case, offering free, top-quality products such as xLLM, with free training, instead of increasing the price like PlanetScale. Or for my well-funded vector DB partner, offering a free tier and easy migration for users impacted by the PlanetScale implosion: more about this below.

But opportunities are still there. Dark times lead to true innovation. In the last few weeks, I've been busier than ever:

• Accepting an advisory role with a new startup turning English into Python. They just raised money from Microsoft executives.
• Accepting a role at a new startup generating songs using the voice of famous artists. By contrast to OpenAI, they pay the artists in question via a licensing agreement, making the business fully legit from the ground up.
• Working with a fortune 100 company to implement a self-tuned, enterprise version of xLLM, delivering better results at a fraction of the typical cost, thanks to being GPU-frugal and not based on neural networks.

So, to come back to the topic of this article, what happened to PlanetScale? In short, a week ago, they eliminated the free tier plan and laid off 50% of the staff. Some speculate that they just run out of money and not getting new funding rounds. The event is discussed at lengths on social networks. Does it make sense to move to the paid plan? You may wonder if they will still be around a year from now. Anyway, competitors were quick to react.

See here how to migrate to new free tier plan offered by SingleStore, in less than 5 mins, and be able to do a lot more, like fast vector search in real time geared towards demanding applications including GenAI.

I cannot finish this article without mentioning my experience with Reddit, a company preparing for its IPO. I tried to advertise my free GenAI course in appropriate channels (machine learning and so on), and my relevant ad was consistently rejected after many reviews and discussions. Instead, when you visit these channels, you see irrelevant ads, for instance about Lexus cars. So, they burn the candle at both ends: by not being profitable and by turning down easy money for no reason. No big deal for me, I will pay people to post about my free course on Reddit. It is ironic in a sad way though, because in the end if you refuse easy money and are not profitable, you end up laying off people.