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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

#621

Post by zaphirplane »

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…

The idea that a company DNA somehow lives over 100 years and maintains the same track record is far fetched.

that the OpenAI tech bro are investing in AI using a grown up ROI is similarly far fetched, they are burning money to pull ahead of the reset and assume the world will be in the palm of the winner and there is only 1 winner. Will the investment pay off if there are 3 neck and neck companies ?

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

#622

Post by kelnos »

vlovich123 wrote: post #589
altmanaltman wrote: post #500

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, okay, but you're taking the current leadership's words and claiming they are incorrect because IBM management was not great at identifying trends decades ago. Historical trend is not an indicator of the future and it's not engaging in good faith on the conversation if overspending on AI can be backed by revenue in the future. You're attacking the messenger instead of the message.

I’m saying given IBMs track record of completely failing at innovation repeatedly and failing at investing on the correct technologies, why do you assume today’s CEO is better at it and has bucked the milquetoast culture that has pervaded IBM? It’s a company that has largely divested its ability to provide solutions and technology and turned more into a large shop consultancy (+ milking their legacy mainframe contrac…

Except that, over the same time period, IBM was also very successful at innovation and investing in technologies. Yes, they made some very high-profile misses that the top poster lists, but they were still a powerhouse doing other stuff during that time (as a commenter replying to that points out).

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

#623

Post by zkmon »

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…

So, is the napkin math wrong, or you are just going by the company history?

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

#624

Post by tokioyoyo »

skippyboxedhero wrote: post #258
arisAlexis wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

The incentive for CEOs is announcing the plan to do something, they have no idea if they will actually be able to do it, and it probably won't matter. This happened in the dotcom too btw. Companies built out fibre networks, it wasn't possible to actually build all the physical infra that companies wanted to build so many announced plans that never happened and then, towards the end, companies began aggressively acqui…

It took about 10 months to get 200k GPUs going in xAI data centers. Given the stuff has been being announced for the past 2 years, we shall see how they’re going within the next year.

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

#625

Post by quietbritishjim »

EagnaIonat wrote: post #588
will4274 wrote: post #576

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this AI paper written by a reputable subject matter expert? It seems to be written by a physicist and also be the only academic work by this author in English

So you are dismissing it because of that? Certainly read the paper first and attack the arguments, not the author. It even has 10 pages of citations. I have read it. It is nothing new on the subject, but it was just the recent paper I saw on HN and the person was asking for the link. The crux is an LLM is and can never be intelligent in the sense of an AGI. It is easier to think of it as a way to store and retrieve k…

How many articles on this topic do we imagine there are? Thousands? Hundreds of thousands? It is hopeless to read every one by any author, no matter how unrelated to the domain, and judge them individually on their merits. Being a subject domain expert is not a perfect measure of paper quality but it's the only feasible way to make a first pass at filtering.

Even if I did read it, I have no hope of understanding if it has made a fundamental mistake because I don't have the subject matter expertise either.

(I imagine it has made a fundamental mistake anyway: for LLMs to be useful progress toward AGI they don't have to be a feasible way to create AGI by themselves. Innovation very often involves stepping through technologies that end up only being a component of the final solution, or inspiration for the final solution. This was always going to be an issue with trying to prove a negative.)

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

#626

Post by kelnos »

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…

We can cherry-pick blunders made by any big company to make a point. Maybe it would be more honest to also list companies IBM passed on that turned out to be rubbish? And all the technologies that IBM did invest in that made them a ton of money and became industry standards?[0]

Today, Xerox has less total revenue than IBM has profit. DEC went out of business 27 years ago. Apple is an in astoundingly great place right now, but Jobs got kicked out of his own company, and then returned when it was about to fail, having to take investment from Microsoft(!) in order to stay afloat.

Meanwhile, IBM is still here, making money hand over fist. We might not have a ton of respect for them, being mostly a consulting services company these days, but they're doing just fine.

[0] As another commenter points out: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46131245

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

#627

Post by SequoiaHope »

knowitnone3 wrote: post #197
SequoiaHope wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A broad social safety net makes a huge difference. It’s not just housing it’s socialized medicine, paid family leave, good transit, free high quality education, solving fewer problems with police and more with social support programs and social workers, free meal programs for adults and children in schools, libraries, and a variety of other programs that help ensure people don’t fall through the cracks here or there.…

[flagged]

I intentionally described policies which are already common practice in most European countries, nothing extravagant. Yes there is some cost but the alternative is deep human suffering which is otherwise avoidable.

But this isn’t really “giving them” anything. It’s giving ourselves safety and security.

It wouldn’t make sense to give you a car. We would give you a working train system instead. Again this is common in Europe and Asia. Indeed every person is “given” access to a high quality transit network with affordable tickets.

To be clear, I personally am an anarcho communist. I think we would be better off if we organized to ensure every person has their basic needs met by the established wealth of society. That isn’t all that dramatic - making sure everyone can ride high quality trains and get medical care when they need it are common in most countries for example.

For housing, I really like the Vienna model:

https://socialhousing.wien/policy/the-vienna-model

For food, follow the Sikhs:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46126736

Consider the Linux ecosystem. “Give them everything and expect nothing” works fine despite the great effort which goes in to building and maintaining that system. We can study the economics of this and build more systems like that.

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

#628

Post by ahartmetz »

Aperocky wrote: post #522
helsinkiandrew wrote: post #514

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> IBM has not exactly had a stellar record at identifying the future. IBM invented/developed/introduced magnetic stripe cards, UPC Barcodes, the modern ATM, Hard drives, floppies, DRAM, SQL, the 360 Family of Mainframes, the PC, Apollo guidance computers, Deep Blue. IBM created a far share of the future we're living in. I'm no fan of much of what IBM is doing at the moment but it could be argued that its consultancy/…

The other way to look at it is that the entire consulting industry is teetering on catastrophe. And IBM, being largely a consulting company now, is not being spared.

> The other way to look at it is that the entire consulting industry is teetering on catastrophe

Oh? Where'd you get that information?

If you mean because of AI, it doesn't seem to apply much to IBM. They are probably not great at what they do like most such companies, but they are respectable and can take the blame if something goes wrong. AI doesn't have these properties.

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

#629

Post by trueno »

EagnaIonat wrote: post #581
mkl wrote: post #578

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A single author, in a physics department. Seems unlikely to be groundbreaking or authoritative.

Welcome to the world of papers. Have a read and get back to us. Dismissing out of hand is rarely constructive.

took me a while but i read it. thought it was actually a pretty good and well researched paper that does a good job rationalizing its thesis. thanks for sharing

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

#630

Post by otikik »

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…

Even a broken watch is right twice per day
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