Hi, good detailed post. Isn't appen's fall because the mag 7 tech stocks already have the deep learning data sets and no longer need appen? Almost all of the revenue drop comes from global service, and it was all just facebook until the August 2023 showed a drop on global service ex facebook, meaning google is reducing spend too. I've been following /r/workonline and it's not just a problem with appen, people have complained that work has fallen across telus, clickworker, taskus, and some others, though they whine about appen the most. Look at share price of telus international, and remember the data labelling sweatshop is just a part of their business, they have a big portion of their business in digital customer experience consulting which is completely unrelated to appen.
My impression is appen has lagged the rapidly advancing AI industry and they were unable to move on from their labor hire deep learning global service business model, which is now going the way of blockbuster and kodak. Datasets can be reused, appen is mostly in relevance and this has given them more longevity than simple picture labelling, but it wasn't going to last. They've been trying to pivot into LLMs but the CEO said VC backed startups are giving them a hard time, and LLMs require domain experts for RLHF not the basic "is this a hot dog" data labelling for deep learning, which appen did not prepare for before the new CEO came on board but competitors were already preparing for well in advance. Correct me if I'm wrong on this.
The problem with appen is any AI product they come up with, facebook google microsoft oracle and some others can easily do one that's orders of magnitude better. They need some sophisticated niche product to survive in this industry, but the CEO hasn't said anything about this. This is a good discussion of the future of appen Most of the senior execs have left, only Andrew Ettinger remains but I reckon he'll leave too. It shows the state the company is in, no CFO, no CTO, no CPO (product). I think the most likely scenario is t/o, no idea what price.
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