| ▲ | verdverm 17 hours ago |
| IBM CEO is steering a broken ship and it's not improved course, not someone who's words you should take seriously. 1. The missed the AI wave (hired me to teach watson law only to lay me off 5 wks later, one cause of the serious talent issues over there) 2. They bought most of their data center (companies), they have no idea about building and operating one, not at the scale the "competitors" are operating at |
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| ▲ | nabla9 17 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| Everyone should read his argument carefully. Ponder them in silence and accept or reject them in based on the strength of the arguments. |
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| ▲ | scarmig 16 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | His argument follows almost directly, and trivially, from his central premise: a 0% or 1% chance of reaching AGI. Yeah, if you assume technology will stagnate over the next decade and AGI is essentially impossible, these investments will not be profitable. Sam Altman himself wouldn't dispute that. But it's a controversial premise, and one that there's no particular reason to think that the... CEO of IBM would have any insight into. | | |
| ▲ | skeeter2020 16 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | then it seems like neither Sam Altman (pro) or IBM (proxy con) have credible or even really interesting or insightful evidence, theories ... even suggestions for what's likely to happen? i.e. We should stop listening to all of them? | | |
| ▲ | scarmig 16 hours ago | parent [-] | | Agreed. It's essentially a giant gamble with a big payoff, and they're both talking their books. |
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| ▲ | PunchyHamster 11 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | It's a very reasonable claim to make, but yes, average denizen of peanut gallery can spot this is a bubble from a mile way, doensn't need "insight" of napkin math done by some CEO that's not even in the industry. Tho he's probably not too happy that they sold the server business to Lenovo, could at least earn something on selling shovels | |
| ▲ | verdverm 16 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | we don't need AGI to use all that compute we need businesses who are willing to pay for ai / compute at prices where both sides are making money I for one could 10x my AI usage if the results on my side pan out. Spending $100 on ai today has ROI, will 10x that still have ROI for me in a couple years? probably, I expect agentic teams to increase in capability and more of my work. Then the question is can I turn that increase productivity into more revenues (>$1000 / month, one more client would cover this and then some) |
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| ▲ | nyc_data_geek1 17 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | IBM can be a hot mess, and the CEO may not be wrong about this. These things are not mutually exclusive. |
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| ▲ | duxup 17 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Is his math wrong? |
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| ▲ | verdverm 16 hours ago | parent [-] | | Are the numbers he's claiming accurate? They seem like big numbers pulled out of the air, certainly much large than the numbers we've actually seen committed to (not even deployed yet). |
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| ▲ | malux85 17 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Sorry that happened to you, I have been there too, When a company is hiring and laying off like that it’s a serious red flag, the one that did that to me is dead now |
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| ▲ | verdverm 16 hours ago | parent [-] | | It was nearly 10 years ago and changed the course of my career for the better make lemonade as they say! |
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| ▲ | observationist 17 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| IBM CEO has sour grapes. IBM's HPC products were enterprise oriented slop products banked on their reputation, and the ROI torched their credibility when compute costs started getting taken seriously. Watson and other products got smeared into kafkaesque arbitrary branding for other product suites, and they were nearly all painful garbage - mobile device management standing out as a particularly grotesque system to use.
Now, IBM lacks any legitimate competitive edge in any of the bajillion markets they tried to target, no credibility in any of their former flagship domains, and nearly every one of their products is hot garbage that costs too much, often by orders of magnitude, compared to similar functionality you can get from things like open source or even free software offered and serviced by other companies.
They blew a ton of money on HPC before there was any legitimate reason to do so. Watson on Jeopardy was probably the last legitimately impressive thing they did, and all of their tech and expertise has been outclassed since. |
