I was forced to work with IBM closely for years. That has led me to believe it's the single most institutionally incompetent company in the world. If they ever do anything well it's pure coincidence and most likely due to some single hero dev.
IBM Bob
311–320 of 351 posts
Re: IBM Bob
#312For all the smarm and jokes, IBM still makes ~$70B in annual revenue and enables billions more in systems integrators. Not many companies can say that.
This allows them to take the secondary revenue in-house and potentially fund a new mainframe business.
It's a [smart-ish because it's their only] strategy for the near term, because long term businesses will be moving off their mainframes and onto more powerful and intelligent systems that can 'think'.
Business Machines 1.0 were CRUD; if they pull this off they can at least get enough capital to maybe upgrade business machines to 2.0
Good on them for at least trying.
Re: IBM Bob
#313Nobody ever got fired for IBM Bob setting up a secret message board and establishing a persistent foothold in an internal inference cluster
Nobody has yet been fired for IBM Bob setting up a secret message board and establishing a persistent foothold in an internal inference cluster
IBM got banned from Queensland gov contracts for 12 years, after the humans decided to secretly scan all legal docs for contract insider knowledge.
I'm sure artificial IBM will be much more... Principled.
Re: IBM Bob
#314I was at an IBM Bob party, behind the scenes it's basically other frontier models with an IBM-specific context.
It's been a while since Sonnet 4.5 could be considered frontier :D
Where did you find that it is based on sonnet? While I wouldn't be surprised, I'm curious if that is disclosed somewhere
Re: IBM Bob
#315You should never name a tech product Bob in the UK, because the moment it isn't perfect, it'll just get called "Bobbins" [0], especially where I'm from. I wish IBM got better at product again, and took themselves off the services and consulting morphine they've been on for ~35 years now since OS/2 Warp flopped. Their 1980s/1990s hardware was great. Their software actually was great until Win95 took their lunch money.…
I thought you were going to say about "bob" being a slang word for a poo.
Turns out that's a particularly East Midlands thing!
Re: IBM Bob
#316IBM should be searching their patents, obscure computer architecture research, and historical low level hardware development to try to figure out how to get low energy AI systems running.
They should pivot their cloud offerings toward research labs.
“Here’s 10 different clusters of analog compute you can rent for half the price of building it out yourselves. It doesn’t map to the math you’re using right now, but it looks much more like a human brain. Have fun!”
Re: IBM Bob
#317Earlier quoted context omitted.
I believe it sends to various models in the background, So largely a harness / framework. Ibm does have its own model which is one of the options for Bob to use. (Note, I'm an IBMer but nowhere near this so my comment is strictly from my public knowledge/awareness:).
Never heard of Granite? https://huggingface.co/ibm-granite (I'm also an IBMer.)
Yes, hence :
>>"Ibm does have its own model which is one of the options for Bob to use." :)
Re: IBM Bob
#318For all the smarm and jokes, IBM still makes ~$70B in annual revenue and enables billions more in systems integrators. Not many companies can say that. This allows them to take the secondary revenue in-house and potentially fund a new mainframe business. It's a [smart-ish because it's their only] strategy for the near term, because long term businesses will be moving off their mainframes and onto more powerful and in…
Well for some company already running IBM Z, using Bobcoins might make sense (we will see what happens)
for a FE dev or some nodejs dev this sounds stupid, who cares but for someone who deals with their stack it might mean something to get IBM-specific tooling/knowledge that works with tech like CICS, IMS, Db2, JCL and RPG etc.
also, they say they use a mix of Claude,Mistral and specialized models (some form of IBM Granite perhaps, idk) so its not that Bob will be retarded
Bobcoins and Bobalytics stuff is still hilarious though XD
Re: IBM Bob
#319Re: IBM Bob
#320Earlier quoted context omitted.
The fun parts of HP split off years ago into Agilent, Keysight, and HPE. Current HP is just a printer and office PC corp.
As a fun addition, I think the atomic clock/time standards division went HP → Agilent → Symmetricom → Microsemi → Microchip. You could have bought a HP 5071A Cesium Frequency Standard under all of these badges! https://www.microchip.com/en-us/products/clock-and-timing/co...
Those HP System II enclosures introduced in the late 60s sure have a very long lifespan.