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

741–750 of 985 posts

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

#741

Post by pezgrande »

roncesvalles wrote: post #475
prodigycorp wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

also because the market (correctly) rewards ibm for nothing, so if they’re going to sit around twiddling their fingers, they may as well do it in a capex-lite way.

I'm still flumoxed by how IBM stock went from ~$130 to $300 in the last few years for essentially no change in their fundamentals (in fact, a decline). IBM's stock price to me is the single most alarming sign of either extreme shadow inflation, or an equities bubble. Why do you say the market correctly prices it this way?

maybe acquiring Redhat improve the expectations? All these new fancy AI datacenter may be considering using Redhat/Centos.

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

#743

Post by sph »

written-beyond wrote: post #554
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.

I'm just as much of an avid llm code generator fan as you may be but I do wonder about the practicality of spending time making projects anymore. Why build them if other can just generate them too, where is the value of making so many projects? If the value is in who can sell it the best to people who can't generate it, isn't it just a matter of time before someone else will generate one and they may become better th…

> Why build them if other can just generate them too, where is the value of making so many projects?

No offence to anyone but these generated projects are nothing ground-breaking. As soon as you venture outside the usual CRUD apps where novelty and serious engineering is necessary, the value proposition of LLMs drops considerably.

For example, I'm exploring a novel design for a microkernel, and I have no need for machine generated boilerplate, as most of the hard work is not implementing yet another JSON API boilerplate, but it's thinking very hard with pen and paper about something few have thought before, and even fewer LLMs have been trained on, and have no intelligence to ponder upon the material.

To be fair, even for the most dumb side-projects, like the notes app I wrote for myself, there is still a joy in doing things by hand, because I do not care about shipping early and getting VC money.

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

#744

Post by selimthegrim »

SequoiaHope wrote: post #141
ayaros wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a younger millennial. I'm always seeing homeless people in my city and it's an issue that I think about on a daily basis. Couldn't we have spent the money on homeless shelters and food and other things? So many people are in poverty, they can't afford basic necessities. The world is shitty. Yes, I know it's all capital from VC firms and investment firms and other private sources , but it's still capital . It shou…

The Sikhs in India run multiple facilities across the country that each can serve 50,000-100,000 free meals a day. It doesn’t even take much in the form of resources, and we could do this in every major city in the US yet we still don’t do it. It’s quite disheartening. https://youtu.be/5FWWe2U41N8

They didn’t invent it but yes, they have refined it to a high degree.

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

#745

Post by infecto »

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...

I am a senior engineer, I use cursor a lot in my day to day. I find I can code longer and typically faster than without. Is it on par with human? It’s getting pretty darn close to be honest, I am sure the “10x” engineers of the world would disagree but it definitely has surpassed a junior engineer. We all have our anecdotes but I am inclined to believe on average there is net value.

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

#746

Post by axegon_ »

blkhawk wrote: post #714
axegon_ wrote: post #681

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The amount of hate I've received here for similar statements is astonishing. What is even more astonishing is that it takes 3-rd grade math skills to work out that the current AI(even ignoring the fact that there is nothing intelligent about the current AI) costs are astronomical and they do not deliver on the promises and everyone is operating at wild loses. At the moment we are at "if you owe 100k to your bank, you…

I don't want to defend musk in any way but I think you are making a mistake there using him as an example because what boosted him quite a lot is that he actually delivered what he claimed. Always late but still earlier than anybody was guesstimating. And now he is completely spiraling but its a lot harder to lose a billion than to gain one so he persists and even gets richer. Plus his "fanatical" followers are poor.…

Sounds a lot like "I'm not racist but". There's a website dedicated to all of his bs https://elonmusk.today

He is the definition of a cult. Collects money from fanatical followers who will praise every word he says, never delivers, "oh next year guys, for sure, wanna buy a not a flamethrower, while you are at it?". Not to mention what once were laughable conspiracy theories about him turned out to be true(such that even I laughed when I heard them). Torvalds is right with his statement about musk: "incompetent" and "too stupid to work at a tech company".

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

#747

Post by infecto »

blablabla123 wrote: post #678
will4274 wrote: post #583

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

Constraints breed innovation. Humans will continue to innovate and demand for resources will grow. it is fairly well baked into most of civilization. Will that change in the future? Perhaps but it’s not changing now.

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

#748

Post by intrasight »

kelnos wrote: post #632
intrasight wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Big tech is going to have to fund the plants and probably transmission. Because the energy utilities have a decades long planning horizon for investments. Good discussion about this in recent Odd Lots podcast.

I've read a bunch of the opposite: a lot of secret deals between tech companies and utilities, where when details come out, we find that regular ratepayers are going to be paying a decent chunk of the cost.

That was discussed in the Odd Lots episode as well. But that can only happen in unregulated markets.

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

#749

Post by axegon_ »

consp wrote: post #698
axegon_ wrote: post #681

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The amount of hate I've received here for similar statements is astonishing. What is even more astonishing is that it takes 3-rd grade math skills to work out that the current AI(even ignoring the fact that there is nothing intelligent about the current AI) costs are astronomical and they do not deliver on the promises and everyone is operating at wild loses. At the moment we are at "if you owe 100k to your bank, you…

The last sentence sounds a lot like a (partial?) Ponzi scheme.

Pretty close really. Just enough to buy some plausible deniability I suppose.

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

#750

Post by VerminOctopus1 »

tempest_ wrote: post #482
bpicolo wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazing that 4 of the top 5 are renewables in China.

Not really that surprising. Authoritarianism has its draw backs obviously but one of its more efficient points is it can get things done if the will is at the top. Since China doesnt have a large domestic oil supply like the US it is a state security issue to get off oil as fast as possible.

It’s become clear that some form of top down total technocratic control like China has implemented is essential for pushing humanity forward.
Post reply on HN