Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

businessinsider.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

651–660 of 985 posts

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

#651

Post by nosianu »

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…

For some strange reason a lot of people were attracted by a comment that speaks about everything else BUT the actual topic and its the top comment now. Sigh.

If you think that carefully chosen anecdotes out of many many more are relevant, there needs to be at least an attempt of reasoning. There is nothing here. It's really just barebones mentioning of stuff intentionally selected to support the preconceived point.

I think we can, and should, do better in HN discussions, no? This is "vibe commenting".

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

#652

Post by Glemkloksdjf »

helsinkiandrew wrote: post #514
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…

> 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/…

For the fact that they invented Deep Blue, they are really struggling with AI

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

#653

Post by Glemkloksdjf »

EagnaIonat wrote: post #524
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…

I read the actual article. He is pointing out that the current costs to create the data centres means you will never be able to make a profit to cover those costs. $800 Billion just to cover the interest. OpenAI is already haemorrhaging money and the space data centres has already been debunked. There is even a recent paper that points out that LLMs will never become AGI. The article also finishes out with some other…

Sry to say but the fact that you argue with LLMs never become AGI, you are not up-to-date.

People don't assume LLM will be AGI, people assume that World Models will lead us to AGI.

I personally never asumed LLM will become AGI, i always assumed that LLM broke the dam for investment and research into massivce scale compute ML learning and LLMs are very very good in showing were the future goes because they are already so crazy good that people can now imagine a future were AGI exists.

And that was very clear already when / as soon as GPT-3 came out.

The next big thing will probably be either a LOT more RL or self propelling ai architecture discovery. Both need massive compute to work well but then will potentially provide even faster progress as soon as humans are out of the loop.

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

#654

Post by zorked »

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…

This isn't even a great argument at a literal level. Nowadays nobody cares about Xerox and their business is selling printers, DEC was bought by Compaq which was bought by HP. Apple is important today because of phones, and itself was struggling selling personal computers and needed a (antitrust-motivated) bailout from Microsoft to survive during the transition.

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

#655

Post by camillomiller »

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…

IBM is still alive and kicking well, and definitively more relevant than Xerox or DEC. You are completely misconstruing Jobs’ point to justify the current AI datacenter tulip fever.

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

#656

Post by EagnaIonat »

quietbritishjim wrote: post #625
EagnaIonat wrote: post #588

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

> It is hopeless to read every one by any author,

It was a paper posted on HN a few days ago and someone asked for the evidence of my statement. I supplied it.

Now if they actually read it and disagreed with what it was saying, I'd be more than happy to continue the conversation.

Dismissing it just because you don't understand is a terrible thing to do to yourself. It's basically sabotaging your intelligence.

Sometimes papers are garbage, but you can only make that statement after you have read/understood it.

Use an LLM if you want.

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

#657

Post by camillomiller »

elnatro wrote: post #493
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…

Were Xerox, Dec, or Apple burning investor money by the billions of dollars?

“If you’re not happy you can sell your shares”

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

#659

Post by EagnaIonat »

vlovich123 wrote: post #641
kelnos wrote: post #622

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Except all the technologies listed were basically in the heydey of the 70s and 80s. Gerstner redirected IBM into an enterprise services business in the early 90s and by the late 90s that's where all their money was. The 2002 acquisition of PwC consulting cemented this shift. In the mid 2010s under Ginni Rometty IBM software became secondary and it abandoned selling it as standalone software instead bundling it into i…

> So IBM hasn't been doing hardware R&D for about three decades

Even a 5 second google search says you are wrong.

https://research.ibm.com/semiconductors/ai-hardware-center

https://research.ibm.com/topics/quantum-hardware

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

#660

Post by wartywhoa23 »

bloppe wrote: post #590
delaminator wrote: post #543

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your assessment of Claude simply isn’t true. Or Stackoverflow is really good. I’m producing multiple projects per week that are weeks of work each.

Would you mind sharing some of these projects? I've found Claude's usefulness is highly variable, though somewhat predictable. It can write `jq` filters flawlessly every time, whereas I would normally spend 30 minutes scanning docs because nobody memorizes `jq` syntax. And it can comb through server logs in every pod of my k8s clusters extremely fast. But it often struggles making quality code changes in a large code…

They really should have been supplying at least a week worth of readymade "projects" to every freelance AI promoter out there to demonstrate x9000 AI productivity gains for the skeptics.

Because vibing the air about those gains without any evidence looks too shilly.

Post reply on HN