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

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

#671

Post by skydhash »

eschaton wrote: post #604
jstummbillig wrote: post #564

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The value is that we need a lot more software and now, because building software has gotten so much less time consuming, you can sell software to people that could/would not have paid for it previously at a different price point.

We don’t need more software, we need the right software implemented better. That’s not something LLMs can possibly give us because they’re fucking pachinko machines. Here’s a hint: Nobody should ever write a CRUD app, because nobody should ever have to write a CRUD app; that’s something that can be generated fully and deterministically (i.e. by a set of locally-executable heuristics, not a goddamn ocean-boiling LLM)…

Most CRUD software development is not really about the CRUD part. And for most framework, you can find packages that generate the UI and the glue code that ties it to the database.

When you're doing CRUD, you're spending most of the time with the extra constraints designed by product. It's dealing with the CRUD events, the IAM system, the Notification system,...

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

#672

Post by highwaylights »

hinkley wrote: post #550
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/…

They also either fairly accurately predicted the death of HDDs by selling off their research division before the market collapsed, or they caused the end of the HDD era by selling off their research division. They did a lot of research.

I think the retail market is maybe dead but datacenters are still a fairly large customer I’d think. HDDs really shine at scale where they can be fronted by flash and DRAM cache layers.

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

#673

Post by bc569a80a344f9c »

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.

I provide infrastructure for such a cluster that is also available to anyone at the university free of charge. Every year we swap out the oldest 20% of the cluster as we run a five year depreciation schedule. In the last three years, we’ve mostly been swapping in GPU resources at a ration of about 3:1. That’s in response to both usage reports and community surveys.

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

#674

Post by stingraycharles »

m4rtink wrote: post #345
SamvitJ wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

Didn't they buy lots of those actually ?

And to my point, it took Apple to make the iPhone for Google to make Android.

It took OpenAI for Google to finally understand make a product out of their years if not decades of AI research.

YouTube and Maps are both acquisitions indeed.

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

#675

Post by bodge5000 »

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 is the exact kind of thinking that got us into this mess in the first place, and I'm not blaming you for it, it seems to be something all of us do to an extent. We don't look to Meta, who only a few years ago thought that the Metaverse would be the "next big thing" as an example of failure to identify the future, we look to IBM who made that mistake almost 30 years ago. Underestimating a technology seems to stick much harder than overestimating one.

If you want to be seen as relevant in this industry, or as a kind of "thought leader", the easy trick seems to be to hype up everything. If you do that and you're wrong, people will quickly forget. If you don't and you're wrong, that will stain your reputation for decades.

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

#676

Post by properbrew »

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…

Not the OP you're replying to, but I've put together quite a few projects using only LLMs, no hand crafted code anywhere (I couldn't do it!)

https://dnbfamily.com

https://eventme.app

https://blazingbanana.com

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.blazingban...

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.blazingban...

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.blazingban...

Are they perfect? No probably not, but I wouldn't have been able to make any of these without LLMs. The last app was originally built with GPT-3.5.

There is a whole host of other non-public projects I've built with LLMs, these are just a few of the public ones.

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

#677

Post by rbanffy »

highwaylights wrote: post #672
hinkley wrote: post #550

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They also either fairly accurately predicted the death of HDDs by selling off their research division before the market collapsed, or they caused the end of the HDD era by selling off their research division. They did a lot of research.

I think the retail market is maybe dead but datacenters are still a fairly large customer I’d think. HDDs really shine at scale where they can be fronted by flash and DRAM cache layers.

They are still cheaper than flash for cold data, but that’s not going to hold for long. Flash is so much denser the acquisition cost difference for a multi-petabyte store becomes small next to the datacenter space and power needed by HDDs. HDDs require research for increasing density while flash can rely on silicon manufacturing advances for that - not that it doesn’t require specific research, but being able to apply the IP across a vast space makes better economical sense.

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

#678

Post by blablabla123 »

will4274 wrote: post #583
blablabla123 wrote: post #533

Despite the flashy title that's the first "sober" analysis from a CEO I read about the technology. While not even really news, it's also worth mentioning that the energy requirements are impossible to fulfill Also now using ChatGPT intensely since months for all kinds of tasks and having tried Claude etc. None of this is on par with a human. The code snippets are straight out of Stackoverflow...

> While not even really news, it's also worth mentioning that the energy requirements are impossible to fulfill If you believe this, you must also believe that global warming is unstoppable. OpenAI's energy costs are large compared to the current electricity market, but not so large compared to the current energy market. Environmentalists usually suggest that electrification - converting non-electrical energy to elec…

Google recently announced to double AI data center capacity every 6 month. While both unfortunately deal with exponential growth, we are talking about 1% growth CO2 which is bad enough vs 300% effectively per year according to Google

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

#680

Post by Glemkloksdjf »

EagnaIonat wrote: post #666
Glemkloksdjf wrote: post #653

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> People don't assume LLM will be AGI, I wish that was true. > people assume that World Models will lead us to AGI. Who are these people? There is no consensus around this that I have seen. You have anything to review regarding this? > as soon as GPT-3 came out. I don't think that was true at all. It was impressive when it came out, but people in the field clearly saw the limitations and what it is. RL isn't magical…

AlphaGo Zero doesn't need much human intervention at all.

Regarding world models: All the big ones. LeCun, Demis Hassabis, Fei-Fei Li too. And they are all working on it.

LLMs will definitly play some type of role in AGI. After all you can ask an LLM already a lot of basic things like 'what are common tasks to make a tea'. A type of guide, long term fact memory or whatever this can be called.

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