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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

#911

Post by sahn44 »

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'm not a fulltime developer, but manage a large dev team now. So, this project is basically beyond my abilities to code myself by hand. Pre llm, I would expect in neighborhood of 1.5-2 months for a capable dev on my team to produce this and replicate all the features.

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

#912

Post by OhMeadhbh »

mattlondon wrote: post #771
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...

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…

Are you suggesting IBM made up the numbers? Or that CAPEX is a pre-GAI measure and is useless in guiding decision making?

IBM may have a vested interest in calming (or even extinguishing) the AI fire, but they're not the first to point out the numbers look a little wobbly.

And why should I believe OpenAI or Alphabet/Gemini when they say AI will be the royal road to future value? Don't they have a vested interest in making AI investments look attractive?

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

#913

Post by LtWorf »

mattlondon wrote: post #768
m101 wrote: post #760

To all those people that think IBM don't know anything. Calculate this number: # companies 100+ years old / # companies ever existed in 100+ years Then you will see why IBM is pretty special and probably knows what they are doing.

Pretty special? They were making guns and selling computation tools to the Nazis for a bunch of those years. I think they trade now mostly on legacy maintenance contracts (e.g. for mainframes) for e.g. banks who are terrified of rocking their technology-stack-boat, and selling off-shore consultants (which is at SIGNIFICANT risk of disruption - why would you pay IBM squillions to do some contract IT work, when we have…

I don't think selling things to nazis was worse than selling things to israel today.

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

#914

Post by rlpb »

carlCarlCarlCar wrote: post #32
rlpb wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> those gpu's will be obsolete in 5 years, but will the newer be enough better as to be worth replacing them is an open question Doesn't one follow from the other? If newer GPUs aren't worth an upgrade, then surely the old ones aren't obsolete by definition.

MTBF for data center hardware is short; DCs breeze through GPUs compared to even the hardest of hardcore gamers. And there is the whole FOMO effect to business purchases; decision makers will worry their models won't be as fast. Obsolete doesn't mean the reductive notion you have in mind, where theoretically it can still push pixels. Physics will burn them up, and "line go up" will drive demand to replace them.

I don't see how MTBF is connected to obsoletion. My razors don't last long either. I buy replacement razors as required. But the model of razor I use doesn't obsolete.

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

#915

Post by vlovich123 »

EagnaIonat wrote: post #659
vlovich123 wrote: post #641

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except all the technologies listed were basically in the heydey of the 70s and 80s. Gerstner redirected IBM into an enterprise services business in the early 90s and by the late 90s that's where all their money was. The 2002 acquisition of PwC consulting cemented this shift. In the mid 2010s under Ginni Rometty IBM software became secondary and it abandoned selling it as standalone software instead bundling it into i…

> So IBM hasn't been doing hardware R&D for about three decades Even a 5 second google search says you are wrong. https://research.ibm.com/semiconductors/ai-hardware-center https://research.ibm.com/topics/quantum-hardware

Having a research department is very different from whether they are actually accomplishing anything and whether or not it is a meaningful revenue stream. On all fronts this is just not true. The quantum stuff so far in the industry is vapor ware and its unclear wether IBM is really making forward progress vs yearly pronouncements of progress to keep the funding stream open

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

#916

Post by mattlondon »

LtWorf wrote: post #913
mattlondon wrote: post #768

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty special? They were making guns and selling computation tools to the Nazis for a bunch of those years. I think they trade now mostly on legacy maintenance contracts (e.g. for mainframes) for e.g. banks who are terrified of rocking their technology-stack-boat, and selling off-shore consultants (which is at SIGNIFICANT risk of disruption - why would you pay IBM squillions to do some contract IT work, when we have…

I don't think selling things to nazis was worse than selling things to israel today.

Yep, both equally as bad and morally repugnant.

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

#917

Post by JamesSwift »

steve_adams_86 wrote: post #614
bloppe wrote: post #590

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Claude has taught me so much about how to use jq better. And really, way more efficient ways of using the command line in general. It's great. Ironically, the more I learn the less I want to ask it to do things.

Yeah, if you pay attention to its output you can pick up little tips and tricks all over the place.

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

#918

Post by arisAlexis »

AlexandrB wrote: post #866
arisAlexis wrote: post #519

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suggest you read Amodei post called "machines of loving grace". It will change your worldview (probably).

A lot of this stuff is in the realm of "lol" or even "lmao". There's a consistent failure to consider human nature and economic incentives woven through this essay. Probably the most objectionable stuff is in section 2 "Neuroscience and Mind" because the definition of "mental illness" itself is prone to all kind of historical and societal biases. Who gets to decide what a "normal" brain is? Is it the AI? Does the own…

Just remember you "lol" at Nobel laureates and Turing award winners that all agree unanimously that we are going there. You just lol. Not much to say to convince you.

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

#919

Post by delaminator »

sph wrote: post #743
written-beyond wrote: post #554

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mac…

Weird, because I've created a webcam app that does segmentation so they can delete the background and put a new background in I mean, I suppose that's not groundbreaking. But it's not just reading and writing to a database.

I've just added a ATA over Ethernet server in Rust, I thought of doing it in the car on the way home and an hour later I've got a working version.

I type this comment using a voice to text system I built, admittedly it uses Whisper as the transcriber but I've turned it into a personal assistant.

I make stuff every day I just wouldn't bother to make if I had to do it myself. and on top of that it does configuration. So I've had it build full wireguard configs that is taking on our pay addresses so that different destinations cause different routing. I don't know how to do that off the top of my head. I'm not going to spend weeks trying to find out how it works. It took me an evening of prompting.

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

#920

Post by jojobas »

cylemons wrote: post #611
jojobas wrote: post #442

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DEC went down the drain, Xerox is 1/1000 of IBM's market cap. IBM made its own, superior by its relative openness, personal computer that ended up running the world, mostly maintaining direct binary compatibility for 40+ years, even without IBM really paying attention.

How much did IBM itself benefit from the PC? I thought the clones ate their lunch there

Wikipedia says their PC revenue was twice Apple's by 1984 at $4 billion/year. Not bad for a side hustle?

My understanding is that clones were a net positive, just like widespread Windows/Office piracy is a net positive for MS.

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