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

businessinsider.com

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

#841

Post by rvnx »

brookst wrote: post #720
rvnx wrote: post #594

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine how big pile of trash as the current generation of graphics cards used for LLM training will get outdated. It will crash the hardware market (which is a good news for gamers)

A100’s are not suitable for gaming.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vw699ZbUKqg

Looks very playable to me.

It's just an expensive card, but if the market is flooded with them, they can be used in gaming AND in local LLMs.

So it can push the fall of server-side AI even further.

These cards are 400 USD for reference, so if more and more are sold, we can imagine them getting down to 100 USD or so.

(and then similar for A100, H100, etc)

My main concern is the noise because I have seen datacenter hardware and it is crazy. Of course it's not ideal but there is something to do with it.

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

#842

Post by hollerith »

hollerith wrote: post #649
baq wrote: post #566

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hardware was part of the service, obviously.

It is very misleading or outright perverse to write "they were selling software as a service in the IBM 360 days" when there was no public network that could be used to the deliver the service. (There were wide-area networks, but each one was used by a single organization and possibly a few of its most important customers and suppliers, hence the qualifier "public" above.) But anyways, my question to you is, was ther…

Replying to myself:

>except a very minimal fee

the fee would be for membership SHARE. The fee (if it even existed) would not have been passed on to the entity that paid to create the software.

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

#843

Post by AlexandrB »

stevetron wrote: post #838

From the company that said the world market size for computers was about 50. And the company that gave us OS2.

I see a lot of people attacking the messenger but very few addressing the basic logic that you need 800B+ in profit just to pay the interest on some of these investments.

Pointing out IBM's mixed history would be valid if they were making some complex, intricate, hard to verify case for why AI won't be profitable. But the case being made seems like really simple math. A lot of the counterarguments to these economic problems have the form "this time it's different" - something you hear every bubble from .com to 2008.

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

#845

Post by AlexandrB »

ambicapter wrote: post #137
badmonster wrote: post #54

[flagged]

Fiber seems way easier to get long-term value out of then GPUs, though. How many workloads today other than AI justify massive GPU deployments?

Would be funny if all the stagnant GPUs finally brought game streaming to the mainstream.

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

#846

Post by sahn44 »

beepbooptheory wrote: post #779
sahn44 wrote: post #729

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

To be clear, roughly 39.8 hours of just prompting and output to make this website?

41 hours total of prompting, looking at code diffs, reverting, reprompting, and occasional direct code commits. I do review the full code changes nearly every step of the way and often iterate numerous times until I'm satisfied with the resulting code approach.

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

#847

Post by spider-mario »

mark_l_watson wrote: post #753
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 agree. re: energy and other resource use: the analogy I like is with driving cars: we use cars for transportation knowing the environmental costs so we don’t usually just go on two hour drives for the fun of it, rather we drive to get to work, go shopping. I use Gemini 3 but only in specific high value use cases. When I use commercial models I think a little about the societal costs. In the USA we have lost the thr…

Most of the energy for AI does not go into chatbots. Using Gemini is not remotely close to driving a car for 2 hours. If a prompt is 0.3 Wh (https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/infrastructure/measur..., https://andymasley.substack.com/p/a-cheat-sheet-for-conversa...), each prompt is closer to using an e-bike for 50 metres.

You could have your morning shower 1°C less hot and save enough energy for about 200 prompts (assuming 50 litres per shower). (Or skip the shower altogether and save thousands of prompts.)

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

#848

Post by properbrew »

forty wrote: post #735
properbrew wrote: post #676

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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? N…

Maybe the most depressing part of all this is if people start thinking they would not have been able to do things without the LLM. Of course they would have, it's not like LLMs can do anything that you cannot. Maybe it would have taken more time at least the first time and you would have learned a few things in the process.

I understand the point, and to some degree agree. For myself, I really couldn't (not to say it wouldn't have been possible). I tried many many times over so many years and just didn't have the mental stamina for it, it would never "click" like infra/networking/hardware does etc and I would always end up frustrated.

I have learnt so much in this process, nowhere near as much as someone that wrote every line (which is why I think being a good developer will be a hot commodity) but I have had so much fun and enjoyment, alongside actually seeing tangible stuff get created, at the end of the day, that's what it's all about.

I have a finite amount of time to do things, I already want to do more than I can fit into that time, LLMs help me achieve some of them.

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

#849

Post by whiplash451 »

TheCondor wrote: post #828
mattlondon wrote: post #771

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Take this "sober" analysis with a big pinch of salt. IBM have totally missed the AI boat, and a large chunk of their revenue comes from selling expensive consultants to clients who do not have the expertise to do IT work themselves - this business model is at a high risk of being disrupted by those clients just using AI agents instead of paying $2-5000/day for a team of 20 barely-qualified new-grads in some far-off c…

How do you see the math working out? The numbers are staggering.

The fair answer is that nobody knows. Even Ilya answered he does not know on his latest podcast with Dwarkesh.

Both top line and bottom line numbers are staggering. Nobody knows. Let's not try to convince people otherwise.

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

#850

Post by filoeleven »

__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #737
gloosx wrote: post #638

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

If you haunt the pull requests of projects you use I bet you'll find there's a new species of PR: > I'm not an expert in this language or this project but I used AI to add a feature and I think its pretty good. Do you want to use it? I find myself writing these and bumping into others doing the same thing. It's exciting, projects that were stagnant are getting new attention. I understand that a maintainer may not wan…

> People feel more capable to attempt contributions

That does not mean that they are more capable, and that's the problem.

> We do need to be careful not to overwhelm the specialists with such things, as some of them are of low quality, but on the whole it's a really good thing.

That's not what the specialists who have to deal with this slop say. There have been articles about this discussed here already.

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