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IBM CEO says there is 'no way' spending on AI data centers will pay off

businessinsider.com

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Re: IBM CEO says there is 'no way' spending on AI data centers will pay off

#271

Post by marcosdumay »

BanazirGalbasi wrote: post #257
scj wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It'll likely be used to mine bitcoin instead.

The GPUs, sure. The mainboards and CPUs can be used in clusters for general-purpose computing, which is still more prevalent in most scientific research as far as I am aware. My alma mater has a several-thousand-core cluster that any student can request time on as long as they have reason to do so, and it's all CPU compute. Getting non-CS majors to write GPU code is unlikely in that scenario.

> Getting non-CS majors to write GPU code is unlikely in that scenario.

People mostly use a GPU-enabled liblaplac. Physics, chemistry, biology, and medicine departments can absolutely use the GPUs.

Re: IBM CEO says there is 'no way' spending on AI data centers will pay off

#272

Post by stevenjgarner »

rchaud wrote: post #254
stevenjgarner wrote: post #240

"It is 1958. IBM passes up the chance to buy a young, fledgling company that has invented a new technology called xerography. Two years later, Xerox is born, and IBM has been kicking themselves ever since. It is ten years later, the late '60s. Digital Equipment DEC and others invent the minicomputer. IBM dismisses the minicomputer as too small to do serious computing and, therefore, unimportant to their business. DEC…

Got anything vis-a-vis the message as opposed to the messenger? I'm not sure these examples are even the gotchas you're positing them as. Xerox is a dinosaur that was last relevant at the turn of the century, and IBM is a $300bn company. And if it wasn't obvious, the Apple II never made a dent in the corporate market, while IBM and later Windows PCs did. In any case, these examples are almost half a century old and d…

If it's not obvious, Steve's quote is ENTIRELY about capex ROI, and I feel his quote is more relevant to what is happening today than anything Arvind Krishna is imagining. The quote is posted in my comment not to grandstand Apple in any sense, but to grandstand just how consistently wrong IBM has been about so many opportunities that they have failed to read correctly - reprography, mini computers and microcomputers being just three.

Yes it is about ROI: "IBM enters the personal computer market in November ’81 with the IBM PC. 1983 Apple and IBM emerged as the industry’s strongest competitors each selling approximately one billion dollars worth of personal computers in 1983, each will invest greater than fifty million dollars for R&D and another fifty million dollars for television advertising in 1984 totaling almost one quarter of a billion dollars combined, the shakeout is in full swing. The first major firm goes bankrupt with others teetering on the brink, total industry losses for 83 out shadow even the combined profits of Apple and IBM for personal computers."

Re: IBM CEO says there is 'no way' spending on AI data centers will pay off

#273

Post by mrguyorama »

GaryBluto wrote: post #63
ayaros wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a younger millennial. I'm always seeing homeless people in my city and it's an issue that I think about on a daily basis. Couldn't we have spent the money on homeless shelters and food and other things? So many people are in poverty, they can't afford basic necessities. The world is shitty. Yes, I know it's all capital from VC firms and investment firms and other private sources , but it's still capital . It shou…

> Yes, I know it's all capital from VC firms and investment firms and other private sources, but it's still capital. It should be spent on meeting people's basic human needs, not GPU power. It's capital that belongs to people and those people can do what they like with the money they earned. So many great scientific breakthroughs that saved tens of millions of lives would never have happened if you had your way.

Please tell me which of Penicillin, insulin, the transistor, the discovery and analysis of the electric field, discovery of DNA, invention of mRNA vaccines, discovery of pottery, basket weaving, discovery of radiation, the recognition that citrus fruit or vitamin C prevents and cures scurvy (which we discovered like ten times), the process for creating artificial fertilizers, the creation of steel, domestication of beasts of burden, etc were done through Wealthy Barons or other capital holders funding them.

Many of the above were discovered by people explicitly rejecting profit as an outcome. Most of the above predate modern capitalism. Several were explicitly government funded.

Do you have a single example of a scientific breakthrough that saved tens of millions of lives that was done by capital owners?

Re: IBM CEO says there is 'no way' spending on AI data centers will pay off

#274

Post by mikalauskas »

ghaff wrote: post #269
getnormality wrote: post #265

A decade ago, IBM was spending enormous amounts of money to tell me stuff like "cognitive finance is here" in big screen-hogging ads on nytimes.com. They were advertising Watson, vaporware which no one talks about today. Are they bitter that someone else has actually made the AI hype take off?

Initial Watson was sort of a mess. But a lot of the Watson-related tech is integrated into a lot of products these days.

What related tech and what products, interesting to read about them

Re: IBM CEO says there is 'no way' spending on AI data centers will pay off

#275

Post by jimmar »

getnormality wrote: post #265

A decade ago, IBM was spending enormous amounts of money to tell me stuff like "cognitive finance is here" in big screen-hogging ads on nytimes.com. They were advertising Watson, vaporware which no one talks about today. Are they bitter that someone else has actually made the AI hype take off?

I don't know that I'd trust IBM when they are pitching their own stuff. But if anybody has experience with the difficulty of making money off of cutting-edge technology, it's IBM. They were early to AI, early to cloud computing, etc. And yet they failed to capture market share and grow revenues sufficiently in those areas. Cool tech demos (like the Watson Jeopardy) mimic some AI demos today (6-second videos). Yeah, it's cool tech, but what's the product that people will actually pay money for?

I attended a presentation in the early 2000s where an IBM executive was trying to explain to us how big software-as-a-service was going to be and how IBM was investing hundreds of millions into it. IBM was right, but it just wasn't IBM's software that people ended up buying.

Re: IBM CEO says there is 'no way' spending on AI data centers will pay off

#276

Post by scotty79 »

lostmsu wrote: post #29
ic_fly2 wrote: post #25

IBM might not have a data strategy or AI plan but he isn’t wrong on the inability to generate a profit. A bit of napkin math: NVIDIA claims 0.4J per token for their latest generation 1GW plant with 80% utilisation can therefore produce 6.29 10^16 tokens a year. There are ~10^14 tokens on the internet. ~10^19 tokens have been spoken by humans… so far.

> ~10^14 tokens on the internet Does that include image tokens? My bet is with image tokens you are off by at least 5 orders of magnitude for both.

Images are not that big. Each text token is a multidimensional vector.

There were recent observations that rendering the text as an image and ingesting the image might actually be more efficient than using text embedding.

Re: IBM CEO says there is 'no way' spending on AI data centers will pay off

#277

Post by stingraycharles »

getnormality wrote: post #265

A decade ago, IBM was spending enormous amounts of money to tell me stuff like "cognitive finance is here" in big screen-hogging ads on nytimes.com. They were advertising Watson, vaporware which no one talks about today. Are they bitter that someone else has actually made the AI hype take off?

I still have PTSD from how much Watson was being pushed by external consultants to C levels despite it being absolutely useless and incredibly expensive. A/B testing? Watson. Search engine? Watson. Analytics? Watson. No code? Watson.

I spent days, weeks arguing against it and ended up having to dedicate resources to build a PoC just to show it didn’t work, which could have been used elsewhere.

Re: IBM CEO says there is 'no way' spending on AI data centers will pay off

#278

Post by edm0nd »

getnormality wrote: post #265

A decade ago, IBM was spending enormous amounts of money to tell me stuff like "cognitive finance is here" in big screen-hogging ads on nytimes.com. They were advertising Watson, vaporware which no one talks about today. Are they bitter that someone else has actually made the AI hype take off?

Honestly I'm not even sure what IBM does these days. Seems like one company that has slowly been dying for decades.

but when I look at their stock, its at all time highs lol

no idea

Re: IBM CEO says there is 'no way' spending on AI data centers will pay off

#279

Post by lawlessone »

1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #176

One thing we saw with the dot-com bust is how certain individuals were able to cash in on the failures, e.g., low cost hardware, domain names, etc. (NB. prices may exceed $2) Perhaps people are already thinking about they can cash in on the floor space and HVAC systems that will be left in the wake of failed "AI" hype

>cash in on the floor space and HVAC systems that will be left in the wake of failed "AI" hype

I'd worry surveillance companies might.

Re: IBM CEO says there is 'no way' spending on AI data centers will pay off

#280

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

ghaff wrote: post #269
getnormality wrote: post #265

A decade ago, IBM was spending enormous amounts of money to tell me stuff like "cognitive finance is here" in big screen-hogging ads on nytimes.com. They were advertising Watson, vaporware which no one talks about today. Are they bitter that someone else has actually made the AI hype take off?

Initial Watson was sort of a mess. But a lot of the Watson-related tech is integrated into a lot of products these days.

Such as? I'm curious because I know a bunch of people who did a lot of Watson-related work and it was all a dead end, but that was 2020-ish timeframe.
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