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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

#721

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Take a million dollars, give 1,000 poor people $1,000 and every dollar will be spent on goods and services. The companies running those services and making those goods will need to have their employees work more hours, putting more money back in poor people’s pockets in addition to the money the companies make. Those employees have a few extra dollars to spend on goods and services, etc. Give a rich person a million…

You are simply disagreeing with 99% of economists. Money in tax shelter doesn't go threw a portal in another universe. Its either invested or saved as some kind of asset and in that form is in circulation. And again, even if you assume it increases monetary demand (decreases velocity) the central bank targets AD and balances that out. Based on your logic, a country that taxes 100% of all income and redistrubtes it wo…

This feels like you intentionally gave this the least charitable reading. Obviously, I do not think that you could just scale to infinity. If I had said that eating a banana was healthier, I don't think it would be reasonable to say that assertion is ridiculous because that would mean eating 1,000 bananas would make someone the healthiest person. I was pointing out the difference in economic activity, where additional money to a wealthy individual mostly goes into savings/investing while additional money to low-income individuals mostly goes directly into consumption, and that the higher consumption generates more economic activity.

https://bsi-economics.org/rising-income-inequality-and-aggre...

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

#722

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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.

Typical load management that’s existed for 70 years: when interactive workloads are off-peak, you do batch processing. For OpenAI that’s anything from LLM evaluation of the days’ conversations to user profile updates.

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

#724

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HDDs would be much more important today if flash storage didn’t exist.

did you know that SSD are not memory stable if they dont get electricity every now and again...

Spinning platters are prone to catastrophic mechanical failure and tape can undergo delamination. What of it?

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

#725

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> 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.

They own Red Hat Linux, Ansible, OpenShift, and Terraform.

If you are doing anything in the Enterprise space, they probably have their claws in you be it on-prem or cloud.

And their work on quantum...

https://www.forbes.com/sites/baldwin/2025/11/25/inside-ibms-...

Not to mention they are still doing quite a bit of Mainframe...

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

#726

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> 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. The grandparent points to a pattern of failures whereas you point to Meta’s big miss. What you miss about Meta, and I am no fan, is that Facebook purchased Whatsapp and Instagram. In other words, two out of…

> In other words, two out of three ain’t bad; IBM is zero for three. Many others in this thread have pointed out IBM's achievements but regardless, IBM is far from "zero for three".

> Many others in this thread have pointed out IBM's achievements but regardless, IBM is far from "zero for three".

I was specifically commenting in the context of this thread.* I was not trying to characterize either IBM or Meta except with reference to the arguments offered by this thread’s ancestors.

I understood (and understand) that such scorekeeping of a company as storied as IBM is at best reductive and at worst misrepresentative.

* Your reference to “this thread” actually addresses sibling comments to OP (ggggp), not this thread which was started by gggp.

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

#728

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Never in my dreams I could imagine PC parts could be an investment. Someone should start ETF tracking the prices.

For a while with bitcoin, it seemed GPU investing was almost a thing. I just checked, the kit I bought in February was $270, today it is showing up for $1070. Woof. Now I have to decide if I should keep it on the off chance I do get around to that machine or dump it while the getting is good. Then again, who wants to buy RAM of unknown provenance unless they themselves are looking to scam the seller.

I'll give you $300 for it! With that kind of money, you can buy an ice-cold sixer and still have some walkin' around money.

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

#729
post #638
post #590

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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…

It is always "I'm producing 300 projects in a nanosecond" but it's almost never about sharing or actually deploying these ;)

Here's mine fully deployed, https://hackernewsanalyzer.com/. I use it daily and have some users. ~99.7% LLM code. About 1 hour to first working prototype then another 40 hours to get it polished and complete to current state.
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