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

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701–710 of 985 posts

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

#701

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…

I was really just asking, not trying to be dismissive. Expertise is an important context to evaluate a piece of writing.

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

#702

"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/…

I've heard some second hand stories about IBM's way of using "AI" and it is pretty much business oriented and not much of the glamour and galore promises the other companies make (of course you still have shiny new things in business terms). It's actually good entertainment hearing all the internal struggles of business vs fancy during the holidays.

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

#703
post #590

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…

At the end of this week we are releasing https://github.com/eqtylab/cupcake

You can see all of Claude’s commits.

I’ve shipped so much with ai.

Favorite has been metrics dashboards of various kinds - across life and business.

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

#704

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

ibm developed SSMs/mamba models and also releasing trainings datasets i think, also quantum computing is strategic option..

For sure but do you see them at any relevant leader boards? Any news how good they are?

I don't.

I know their models, but not because i constantly read about it

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

#705
post #275

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?

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…

The original statistical machine translation models of the 90's, which were still used well into the 2010's, were famously called the "IBM models" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_alignment_models These were not just cool tech demos, they were the state of the art for decades. (They just didn't make IBM any money.)

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

#706

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Large houses make familial interdependence extremely difficult? That doesn't make sense. Or did I misunderstood? I don't live in the US.

Most people don't have houses large enough to house multiple generations inside the house. Houses are sized for parents + kids. And those are the only dwelling units available or legally allowed for vast distances in any direction.

From what I've seen American bedrooms are far larger that the 12 square meter bedrooms that are normal for two or three children to share in my country. Grandparents don't need a separate wing, they need a room.

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

#707

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

While AGI might be the Holy Grail, AI doesn’t need to be general human-level to be useful and profitable.

it just needs us to wait one more year right?

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

#708

"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 stic…

Good point. That kind of thinking is an absurdity. Saying IBM dropped the ball 70 years ago without acknowledging that lessons were learned, leadership has changed hands a lot since then, and most importantly, the tech landscape back then was very different from today unless you grossly oversimplify everything amounts to nothing more than a fallacious opinion.

Not even much of an IBM fan, myself, but I respect their considerable contribution to the industry. Sure, they missed a shot back then, but I think this latest statement is reliably accurate based on the information we currently have.

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

#709

"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 stic…

It’s easy to be a pessimist. Most things don’t work. So in 9 out of 10 cases you’re right.

But human breakthrough progress came mostly through optimists, who tried things no one else dared to do.

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

#710

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn’t that what Michael Burry is complaining about? That five years is actually too generous when it comes to depreciation of these assets and that companies are being too relaxed with that estimate. The real depreciation is more like 2-3 years for these GPUs that cost tens of thousands of dollars a piece. https://x.com/michaeljburry/status/1987918650104283372

That's exactly the thing. It's only about bookkeeping. The big AI corps keep pushing depreciation for GPUs into the future, no matter how long the hardware is actually useful. Some of them are now at 6 years. But GPUs are advancing fast, and new hardware brings more flops per watt, so there's a strong incentive to switch to the latest chips. Also, they run 24/7 at 100% capacity, so after only 1.5 years, a fair share…

> Also, they run 24/7 at 100% capacity, so after only 1.5 years

How does OpenAI keep this load? I would expect the load at 2pm Eastern to be WAY bigger than the load after California goes to bed.

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