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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

#881

Post by gfaster »

golol wrote: post #839
trueismywork wrote: post #832

Earlier quoted context omitted.

65% of people in the world earn less than 3000 euros/year.

Getting 65% of the population to spend 1% of their income on some new digital toy forever does not seem so far fetched.

That seems super far fetched given that 37%[1] of the world's population does not have internet access. You could reasonably restrict further to populations that speak languages that are even passably represented in LLMs.

Even disregarding that, if you're making [1]: https://ourworldindata.org/internet

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

#882

Post by wordpad »

SchemaLoad wrote: post #264
wordpad wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just like .com bust from companies going online, there is hype, but there is also real value. Even slow non-tech legacy industry companies are deploying chatbots across every department - HR, operations, IT, customer support. All leadership are already planning to cut 50 - 90% of staff from most departments over next decade. It matters, because these initiatives are receiving internal funding which will precipitate o…

The "legacy" industry companies are not immune from hype. Some of those AI initiatives will provide some value, but most of them seem like complete flops. Trying to deploy a solution without an idea of what the problem or product is yet.

Right, but this is consumer side hype.

Even if AI is vaporware is mostly hype and little value, it will take a while to hype to fizzle out and by then AI might start deliver on its promise.

They got a long runway.

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

#883

Post by adastra22 »

DoctorOW wrote: post #661
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 ;)

The problem I had that the larger your project gets, the more mistakes Claude makes. I (not a parent commenter) started with a basic CRUD web app and was blown away by how detailed it was, new CSS, good error handling, good selection and use of libraries, it could even write the terminal commands for package management and building. As the project grew to something larger Claude started forgetting that some code alre…

Have it produce CLAUDE.md files in every directory giving a summary of what code is where, and a system directive to keep these updated.

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

#884

Post by IAmBroom »

atleastoptimal wrote: post #864

>IBM CEO might as well ask a magic 8 ball for more prescient tech takes

It honestly reminds me of the opinion pieces put out by encyclopedia companies about the many ways Wikipedia was inferior.

I read an article that pretended to objectively compare them. It noted that Wikipedia (at that time) had more articles, but not way more... A brief "sampling test" suggested EB was marginally more accurate than Wikipedia - marginally!

The article concluded that EB was superior. Which is what the author was paid to conclude, obviously. "This free tool is marginally better in some ways, and slightly worse in others, than this expensive tool - so fork over your cash!"

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

#885

Post by oedemis »

Glemkloksdjf wrote: post #704
oedemis wrote: post #696

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

https://huggingface.co/ibm here is very interesting research going https://huggingface.co/ibm-granite

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

#886

Post by johncolanduoni »

jayd16 wrote: post #782
johncolanduoni wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, I don’t trust a word Sundar or Satya say about AI either. CEOs should be hyping anything they’re invested in, it’s literally their job. But convincing investors that every thing they don’t invest in heavily is worthless garbage is effectively part of their job too. What is more convincing is when someone invests heavily (and is involved heavily) and then decides to stop sending good money after bad (in their esti…

> What is more convincing is when someone invests heavily (and is involved heavily) and then decides to stop sending good money after bad (in their estimation). But Watson doesn't count?

Commercially, Watson was a joke from beginning to end. If their argument is that Watson’s failure indicates a machine that can at the very least convincingly lie to you will definitely fail to make money, that’s an insipid argument.

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

#887

Post by IAmBroom »

meekaaku wrote: post #602
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/…

IBM is/was good at inventing a lot of tech. It may not be good at recognizing other good tech invented or paradigm changes by others

Nor is their CEO in any way unbiased.

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

#888

Post by adastra22 »

beepbooptheory wrote: post #873
sahn44 wrote: post #846

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Have you tried to go back to the old way, maybe just as an experiment, to see how much time you are actually saving? You might be a little surprised! Significant "reprompting" time to me indicates maybe a little too much relying on it rather than leading by example. Things are much faster in general if you find the right loop of maybe using Claude for like 15%-20% of stuff instead of 99.7%. You wouldn't give your jun…

I’ve done things in days that in the before times would have took me months. I don’t see how you can make that time difference up.

I have at least one project where I can make that direct comparison - I spent three months writing something in the language I’ve done most of my professional career in, then as a weekend project I got ChatGPT to write it from scratch in a different language I had never used before. That was pre-agentic tools - it could probably be done in an afternoon now.

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

#889

Post by marcosdumay »

cubefox wrote: post #787
marcosdumay wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Historically, GPUs have improved in efficiency fast enough that people retired their hardware in way less than 5 years. Also, historically the top of the line fabs were focused on CPUs, not GPUs. That has not been true for a generation, so it's not really clear if the depreciation speed will be maintained.

> Historically, GPUs have improved in efficiency fast enough that people retired their hardware in way less than 5 years. This was a time when chip transistor cost was decreasing rapidly. A few years earlier even RAM cost was decreasing quickly. But these times are over now. For example, the PlayStation 5 (where the GPU is the main cost), which launched five years ago, even increased in price! This is historically un…

> This was a time when chip transistor cost was decreasing rapidly.

GPUs were actually mostly playing catch-up. They were progressively becoming more expensive parts that could afford being built on more advanced fabs.

And I'll have to point, "advanced fabs" is a completely post-Moore's law concept. Moore's law is about literally the number of transistors on the most economic package. Not any bullshit about area density that marketing people invented on the last decade (you can go read the paper). With Moore's law, the cheapest fab improves quickly enough that it beats whatever more advanced fabs existed before you can even finish designing a product.

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

#890

Post by Capricorn2481 »

intrasight wrote: post #217
ryandrake wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LOL, maybe Sam Altman can fund those power plants. Let me guess: He'd rather the public pay for it, and for him to benefit/profit from the increased capacity.

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.

Good discussion? This is a Bloomberg podcast with ads from Palantir explicitly telling us AI is not here to replace any of us. They do everything they can to avoid the topic of what the cost is to regular people.

Data centers are built in people's backyards without their permission, wreck the values of their home, and then utility companies jack up their price to compensate for the extra strain on the grid. So the residents have to pay for Big Tech but get no share of the profits. How this podcast does a whole episode on data centers and the electricity grid and doesn't talk about what's actually happening to people, well, that would be surprising if I didn't know where it came from.

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