> 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/service orientation gives it a good view of how business is and is planning to use AI.
They also either fairly accurately predicted the death of HDDs by selling off their research division before the market collapsed, or they caused the end of the HDD era by selling off their research division. They did a lot of research.
I think the retail market is maybe dead but datacenters are still a fairly large customer I’d think. HDDs really shine at scale where they can be fronted by flash and DRAM cache layers.
They are still cheaper than flash for cold data, but that’s not going to hold for long. Flash is so much denser the acquisition cost difference for a multi-petabyte store becomes small next to the datacenter space and power needed by HDDs. HDDs require research for increasing density while flash can rely on silicon manufacturing advances for that - not that it doesn’t require specific research, but being able to apply the IP across a vast space makes better economical sense.
Nope. It is like - suddenly every truck everywhere is Saturn. The unit count may be lower but the total tonnage moved grows. While HDD shipments have fallen fourfold counted in units, if you check total exabytes delivered you will see they are shipping a lot.
The other way to look at it is that the entire consulting industry is teetering on catastrophe. And IBM, being largely a consulting company now, is not being spared.
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.
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.
> The other way to look at it is that the entire consulting industry is teetering on catastrophe
Oh? Where'd you get that information?
If you mean because of AI, it doesn't seem to apply much to IBM. They are probably not great at what they do like most such companies, but they are respectable and can take the blame if something goes wrong. AI doesn't have these properties.
If anything there’s likely plenty of work for body shops like IBM in reviewing and correcting AI-generated work product that has been thrown into production recently.
> A failing company may still be right in identifying other companies failure modes.
Agreed if this is what they are doing, but what if theyre spewing claims to try and discredit an industry in order to quell their shareholder concerns?
They are not the only ones looking at the money spent in AI datacentres and concluding most of the investment will not be recovered anytime soon.
A lot of the silicon being deployed is great for training, but inefficient for inference and the training to inference ratio for usage shows a clear tendency to go the inference way. Furthermore, that silicon, with the workloads it runs, doesn’t last long and needs replacement.
The first ones to go online might recover the investment, but the followers better have a plan to pivot to other uses.
Nitpicking, IBM did non develop _the_ Apollo Guidance Computer (the one in the spacecraft with people), it was Raytheon. They did, however, developed the Launch Vehicle Digital Computer that controlled the Saturn rocket in Apollo missions. AGC had very innovative design, while LVDC was more conventional for that time.
> 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.
Well put. “IBM was wrong about computers being a big deal” is a bizarre take. It’s like saying that Colonel Sanders was wrong about chicken because he, uh… invented the pressure fryer.
I've heard some second hand stories about IBM's way of using "AI" and it is pretty much business oriented and not much of the glamour and galore promises the other companies make (of course you still have shiny new things in business terms). It's actually good entertainment hearing all the internal struggles of business vs fancy during the holidays.
IBM is always very conscious of what their clients need (and the large consultancy business provides a very comprehensive view). It just turns out their clients don’t need IBM to invest in large frontier models.
I think its been done a few times [1]. Crudely put: try to wipe out as much of the immune system then replace with stem cells from a donor. Previously they used donors who had a gene mutation that made them HIV resistant, but this was with 'normal' genes. But a stem cell transplant may have worse survivability than HIV for many people
> Significantly, he is also the second of the seven who received stem cells that were not actually resistant to the virus, strengthening the case that HIV-resistant cells may not be necessary for an HIV cure.
> All free LLM chat apps will need to support ads or they will eventually die due
That’s the issue OpenAI has: Gemini is “free” with google search and other google services. If Apple get their act together they can provide a “privacy respecting” AI free with every iPhone.
I’ve recently switched from OpenAI as my daily ‘helper’ chatbot to Gemini (I’ve done it with Claude in the past and still use that for coding) and don’t miss ChatGPT. Sure each has quirks and one will release a new version and it becomes the best LLM briefly but to the majority of public and businesses they are interchangeable and the winner is the one that can deliver the functionality for free (because it’s paid for by another service) or into an existing product.
> The state needs to make some changes to how content is licensed to prevent monopoly
That sounds similar to the 1984 Cable Communications Act (where large cable operators were required to lease channels to others, separating content delivery from content creation) but in reverse! requiring content producers to licence content to distributors
https://www.renault.co.uk/electric-vehicles/r5-turbo-3e.html
Alas it's more of a concept car with limited sales and a 6 figure price
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