Is the shift because there's nothing to innovate, or because of economic headwinds? That's the real question to ask.
Projects are being cancelled left and right and teams dissolved, so this tells me that the former point is shakey. Something tells me that we'll have a tiny boom sometime after the AI bubble pops and suddenly innovation is "free" again. Or because smaller startups can actually get funded without needed to throw AI somewhere in their pitch deck.
There’s not a lot of actual innovation in software. Hasn’t been in quite some time. Any project a lot of these companies invest in has to be tied to a revenue stream or it doesn’t get funded. I think it’s a wholesale realization that they’ve been throwing money away at projects with no revenue and they’re shaping up/maturing as a company being smarter about what projects they invest in. I’m sure it has to do with tax code changes and such that initiated the bigger rethink. But it’s also just not a lot of big new foundational innovation taking place.
