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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

#921

Post by pseudosavant »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #297
pseudosavant wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The dotcom bust killed companies, not the Internet. AI will be no different. Most players won’t make it, but the tech will endure and expand.

The difference is that the Internet was actually useful technology, whereas AI is not (so far at least).

In the last month I personally used (as in, it was useful) AI for this:

- LLM-powered transcription and translation made it so I could have a long conversation with my airport driver in Vietnam. - Helped me turn 5-10x ideas into working code and usable tools as I used to. - Nano Banana restored dozens of cherished family photos for a Christmas gift for my parents. - Help me correctly fix a ton of nuanced aria/accessibility issues in a production app. - Taught/explained a million things to me: difference between an aneurysm/stroke, why the rise of DX12/Vulkan gaming engines killed off nVidia SLI, political/economic/social parallels between 1920s and 2020s, etc...

Maybe everyone isn't using it yet, but that doesn't mean it isn't useful. Way too many people find real use every day in a lot of AI products. Just because MS Office Copilot sucks (and it does), doesn't mean it is all useless.

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

#922

Post by arisAlexis »

rs186 wrote: post #239
arisAlexis wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Hmm... "CEOs and teams" don't necessary do what's makes sense mathematically. Many, if not most of them, do whatever that sounds good to shareholders in their quarterly earnings call and ignore the reality or long term development. If "CEOs and teams" are smart enough, they would not have overhired during 2021-2022 and then do layoffs. Who would be dumb enough to do that?

I'm sure you know better than CEOs of Google etc that run multitrillion dollar companies for decades. Right ?

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

#924

Post by jojobas »

Aperocky wrote: post #799
kelnos wrote: post #617

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IBM isn't failing, though. They're a profitable company with healthy margins, and enterprises continue to hire them for all sorts of things, in large numbers.

So now it makes more sense why they think the AI spending will/need to fail. Because if it didn't, that's a direct replacement of them.

AI replaces nothing. A consultant or developer is not replaced with AI, he becomes more powerful with AI. An IBM consultant with AI is still way ahead of Johnny Startup with AI.

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

#925

Post by sph »

delaminator wrote: post #919
sph wrote: post #743

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 make stuff every day I just wouldn't bother to make if I had to do it myself

> I'm not going to spend weeks trying to find out how it works.

Then what is the point? For some of us, programming is an art form. Creativity is an art form and an ideal to strive towards. Why have a machine to create something we wouldn’t care about?

The only result is a devaluation to zero of actual effort and passion, whose only beneficiary are those that only care about creating more “product”. Sure, you can pump out products with little effort now, all the while making a few ultrabilionaires richer. Good for you, I guess.

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

#926

Post by __MatrixMan__ »

filoeleven wrote: post #850
__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #737

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What would you have us do, Keep the fixes to ourselves?

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

#927

Post by everforward »

delaminator wrote: post #819
freehorse wrote: post #667

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At this point my prior is that all these 300/ns projects are some kind of internal tools, with very narrow scope and many just for a one-off use. Which is also fine and great and very useful and I am also making those, but it probably does not generalize to projects that require higher quality standards and actual maintenance.

Sure, but 80% of software is probably internal and short lived like that, if not more. Solving the problems of the business that isn’t a software business.

Places that aren't software businesses are usually the inverse. The software is extremely sticky and will be around for ages, and will also bloat to 4x the features it was originally supposed to have.

I worked at an insurance company a decade ago and the majority of their software was ancient. There were a couple desktops in the datacenter lab running Windows NT for something that had never been ported. They'd spent the past decade trying to get off the mainframe and a majority of requests still hit the mainframe at some point. We kept versions of Java and IBM WebSphere on NFS shares because Oracle or IBM (or both) wouldn't even let us download versions that old and insecure.

Software businesses are way more willing to continually rebuild an app every year.

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

#928

Post by pezezin »

arisAlexis wrote: post #517
pezezin wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Poverty is a social and political issue, not technological. We have more than enough resources on this planet to fix it, but we don't.

This is a actually the fallacy of communism. It can never and will never be "fixed" like that.

I won't be fixed by magical AI either.

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

#929

Post by venturecruelty »

UtopiaPunk wrote: post #118
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…

I don't think it is a coincidence that the areas with the wealhiest people/corporations are the same areas with the most extreme poverty. The details are, of course, complicated, but zooming way way out, the rich literally drain wealth from those around them.

Thanks for pointing this out. Sorry you're getting downvoted. I visited San Francisco about ten years ago, and seeing a homeless person sheltering themselves under a flag or some sort of merch from a tech company really drove home just how bereft of humanity corporate power centers really are.

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

#930

Post by tharkun__ »

b112 wrote: post #591
z0mghii wrote: post #445

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well if you have a system that does "nothing" it's hard to argue to replace it

"Nothing" from parent was a comparison. Doesn't mean their system is idle. However many systems are mostly idle. A file server often doesn't use much cpu. It often isn't even serving anything.

That is definitely true and why I compared idle watts. That Athlon uses the same idle watts as modern mobile CPUs. So no reason to replace during the mostly idle times. Spot on. I can't have this system off during idle time as it wouldn't come up to fulfill its purpose fast enough when needed and it would be a pain to trigger that anyway (I mean, really, port knocking to start up that system type thing). Else I would. That I do do with the HTPC which has a more modern Intel core i3.

The "nothing" here was exactly meant more for the times when it does have to do something. But even then at 45W TDP, as long as it's able to do what it needs to, then the newer CPUs have no real edge. What they gain in performance due to multi core they loose in being essentially equivalent single core performance for what that machine does: HTPC file serving, email server etc.

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