351–360 of 985 posts
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That could change with a power generation breakthrough. If power is very cheap then running ancient gear till it falls apart starts making more sense
Power consumption is only part of the equation. More efficient chips => less heat => lower cooling costs and/or higher compute density in the same space.
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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, i…
Xerox was also famously early with a lot of things but failed to create proper products out of it. Google falls somewhere in the middle. They have great R&D but just can’t make products. It took OpenAI to show them how to do it, and the managed to catch up fast .
Even with gemini in lead, its only till they extinguish or make chatgpt unviable for openai as business. OpenAI may loose the talent war and cease to be leader in this domain against google (or Facebook) , but in longer term their incentive to break fresh aligns with average user requirements . With Chinese AI just behind, may be google/microsoft have no choice either
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Just not too old. Easy to get into "power usage makes it not worth it" for any use case when it runs 24/7
Seriously. 24/7 adds up faster than most realize! The idle wattage per module has shrunk from 2.5-3W down to 1-1.2 between DDR3 & DDR5. Assuming a 1.3W difference (so 10.4W for 8760 hours), a DDR3 machine with 8 sticks would increase your yearly power consumption by almost 1% (assuming avg 10,500kWh/yr household) That's only a couple dollars in most cases but the gap is only larger in every other instance. When I upg…
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
I would add an addendum to this -- there is no way the announced spending on AI data centers will all come to fruition. I have no doubt that there will be a massive build-out of infrastructure, but it can't reach the levels that have been announced. The power requirements alone will stop that from happening.
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I disagree on that and covered a lot of it in this blog (sorry for the plug!) https://martinalderson.com/posts/are-we-really-repeating-the...
For short searches, the revenue per token is zero. The next step is $20 per month. For coding it's $100 per month. With the competition between Gemini, Grok, ChatGPT... it's not going higher. Maybe it goes lower since it's part of Google's playbook to give away things for free.
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"They have great R&D but just can’t make products" Is this just something you repeat without thinking? It seems to be a popular sentiment here on Hacker News, but really makes no sense if you think about it. Products: Search, Gmail, Chrome, Android, Maps, Youtube, Workspace (Drive, Docs, Sheets, Calendar, Meet), Photos, Play Store, Chromebook, Pixel ... not to mention Cloud, Waymo, and Gemini ... So many widely adopt…
I think the sentiment is usually paired with discussion about those products as long-lasting, revenue-generating things. Many of those ended up feeding back into Search and Ads. As an exercise, out of the list you described, how many of those are meaningfully-revenue-generating, without ads? A phrasing I've heard is "Google regularly kills billion-dollar businesses because that doesn't move the needle compared to an…
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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.
IBM did a lot of pretty fragmented and often PR-adjacent work. And getting into some industry-specific (e.g. healthcare) things that didn't really work out. But my understanding is that it's better standardized and embedded in products these days.
Taking a look at IBM's Watson page, https://www.ibm.com/watson, it appears to me that they basically started over with "watsonx" in 2023 (after ChatGPT was released) and what's there now is basically just a hat tip to their previous branding.
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In TX? In Russian blogosphere it is a standard staple that Trump is rushing Ukrainian peace deal to be able to move on to the set of mega-projects with Russia - oil/gas in Arctic and data centers in Russian North-West where electricity and cooling is plentiful and cheap.
Sounds like kremlebot’s, however it’s unclear for me the motivation behind pushing this narrative. Also, why don’t build DCs in Alaska instead?
I think any such data center project is doomed to ultimately fail, and any serious investment will be for me a sign of the bubble peak exuberance and irrationality.
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Xerox was also famously early with a lot of things but failed to create proper products out of it. Google falls somewhere in the middle. They have great R&D but just can’t make products. It took OpenAI to show them how to do it, and the managed to catch up fast .
"They have great R&D but just can’t make products" Is this just something you repeat without thinking? It seems to be a popular sentiment here on Hacker News, but really makes no sense if you think about it. Products: Search, Gmail, Chrome, Android, Maps, Youtube, Workspace (Drive, Docs, Sheets, Calendar, Meet), Photos, Play Store, Chromebook, Pixel ... not to mention Cloud, Waymo, and Gemini ... So many widely adopt…
But I reckon part of the sentiment stems from many of the more famous Google products being acquisitions orignally (Android, YouTube, Maps, Docs, Sheets, DeepMind) or originally built by individual contributors internally (Gmail).
Then here were also several times where Google came out with multiple different products with similar names replacing each other. Like when they had I don't know how many variants of chat and meeting apps replacing each other in a short period of time. And now the same thing with all the different confusing Gemini offerings. Which leads to the impression that they don't know what they are doing product wise.