• IBM's CEO walked through some napkin math on data centers— and said that there's "no way" to turn a profit at current costs.
  • "$8 trillion of CapEx means you need roughly $800 billion of profit just to pay for the interest," Arvind Krishna told "Decoder."
  • Krishna was skeptical of that current tech would reach AGI, putting the likelihood between 0-1%.

all 28 comments

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[–] 105 points 11 months ago* (6 children)

IBM has a surprisingly sane approach to LLMs:

  • Small models

  • Economically trained

  • Apache licensed open weights

  • Geared for tool usage/RAG

  • Well documented

  • Legal, licensed training data

  • Open experiment artifacts, including A/B tests

See: https://huggingface.co/ibm-granite

No nebulous promises, no existential hype, no scorching the environment, no underbaked user facing disasters. Just plain locally runnable tools.

It’s so sensible it hurts. This is what all “AI” companies should be doing, albeit with a little more budget, and more modern architectures than dense GQA.

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  • [+] 29 points 11 months ago (1 child)
  • [–] 10 points 11 months ago*

    I mean, a lot of internal corporate "AI" systems I've seen are ChatGPT wrappers, and total messes. But they get approval and funding.

    Another odd thing is that IBM's hardly 'selling' here. These are basically open source contributions for PR, with the hope that they're used internally or in their other businesses I guess. But it's quite low-key for PR.

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  • [–] 7 points 11 months ago (3 children)

    "Never interfere with an enemy while they are making a mistake"

    We can quibble about if they are true enemies but these AI companies are certainly not our allies.

    I hope to live long enough to see Facebook/Google/Amazon be acquired by an investment firm and sold for parts.

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  • [–] 3 points 11 months ago

    Meh, better they get ordered to become Nationalized, all their IP licensed GNU, a budget allocated for their maintenance, data harvesting stripped, and anyone can submit PRs.

    True public infrastructure.

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  • [–] 44 points 11 months ago* (11 children)

    Jesus Christ, when even IBM, the father of computing, says "AI is not gonna give you infinite money", you KNOW the technology is doomed. Altho I'm more inclined to believe the AI CEOs will be like "shut up boomer we're gonna be trillionaires and you won't be!!"

    Well, good luck with that once the investors realize you're selling snake oil!

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  • [+] -37 points 11 months ago (10 children)

    I really don't understand why lemmy hates ai so much. I get massive productivity gains every day from AI. I agree with this exec that we probably won't hit AGI using current tech or maybe ever, but we still have:

    • incredibly useful image generation that dramatically speeds up the work of designers
    • coding agents that, when used skillfully, generate usable code, and review code pretty well in PRs
    • suno, which can generate stems that my musician friends are regularly using instead of having to hunt through the Internet for days for the right trumpet melody

    How this translates to profit is unclear since there is a race to the bottom, companies are choosing to give away the tech to gain market share rn, but the technology is undeniably useful, and already rolled out inside of every major tech company

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  • [–] 34 points 11 months ago

    I really don't understand why lemmy hates technology which regurgitates slop based on data stolen from creators against their will, erodes trust, degrades mental health, wreaks havoc on the labor force, destroys the environment, and temporarily enriches a handful of fake billionaires with fake money…gosh I just don't understand!

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  • [–] 25 points 11 months ago

    I hate AI because it demands that I hate it. It has been forced down my throat on every other platform to the point where I can only really escape it on Lemmy. The art it creates is soulless, the environmental impact is going unchecked and uncharted, the constant expansion of data centers is putting a huge strain on local infrastructure, and the LLMs and front facing products are just the ad campaign. The real horror of AI aren't spoken about; The expansion of the police state, The Military Industrial Complex creating autonomous death machines, and the entire western economy is being held up by a bubble that everyone is actively ignoring.

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  • [–] 42 points 11 months ago

    I get massive productivity gains every day from AI

    You mean heavily hallucinated code you're gonna spend more time fixing than if you did it by hand?

    incredibly useful image generation that dramatically speeds up the work of designers

    AKA: Stealing from hard working artists to not have to pay them. As an artist, go fuck yourself.

    suno, which can generate stems that my musician friends are regularly using instead of having to hunt through the Internet for days for the right trumpet melody

    Again, stealing from hard working artists (this time musicians). Hard fucking pass.

    Also, you definitely sound like you wrote this with AI. Mods, send this clanker to the scrap heap.

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  • [–] 22 points 11 months ago (1 child)

    So far my direct experience with ai is

    • minor efficiency improvements as another programming tool. It can help with syntax, boilerplate, scaling out unit tests BUT IS NEVER. A FINAL PRODUCT
    • MAJOR time sink from junior developers who let ai run amuck without putting in the effort to make it work
    • TECH DEBT from hundreds of excessive unit tests poorly written for maintainability and with no added value
    • INSTABILITY from junior developers letting ai commit slop to the default branch, wasting my time trying to back out thousands of lines of nonsense
    • MISMANAGEMENT where I felt forced to run my writeups through ai to “translate” into something recognizably generated so I could fulfill mandates to use ai
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  • [–] 2 points 11 months ago

    OMG the mandates. We're got those too. It's ok to have the option, it's bad to have the mandate.

    I'm reminded of the criticism that middle management likes AI because all MGMT has to do is summarize and report up, something AI is actually pretty good at. And they think they're smart, so they think AI should be able to do other jobs too, except they're so detached from production that they don't understand how far it falls short.

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  • [–] 11 points 11 months ago

    Lemmy is rather over-the-top for AI hate. I agree it can be damned useful, but can't see it ever paying off for these companies.

    My bitching revolves around two items:

    1. It's a fucking environmental disaster. Even without these data centers, we're draining aquifers that took 1,000s of years to fill and major cities all over the planet are about to completely run out of water. And that's not even touching on the power usage, pollution and how it's affecting residential rates!

    2. It's a fucking economic disaster. Have a look at the Buffett Index, total stock market valuation vs. GDP. It's over 200% ATM and wasn't close to that for the Great Depression, the dotcom bust or 2008. We are in deep shit.

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  • [–] 5 points 11 months ago*

    I occasionally have these spells where I forget what I’ve previously learnt, and choose to try to let an ai help me out with some particularly boring code, think something mundane but laborous. So I succumb to the temptation.

    And every fucking time I come out having wasted time and still having to do the thing, or at any rate, something equally boring and mundane, myself manually, because either the result is so ridiculous that it requires extensive cleanup/refactoring or just won’t get there at all.

    And each time I merrily keep forgetting this, learn nothing from it beyond the short term, because I seem to be hardwired to try and skip the boring stuff.

    There’s no escaping the boring stuff.

    Thing is, what these models really do, is give a small dose of escapism under a fragile illusion of productivity, so for a moment there you feel good, “released”, though only postponing the boring fucking work and annoying your future self.

    But that escapism sells well, because we yearn it. Same with entertainment. Games. The escape from mundane, boring and annoyingly repetitive life.

    For a method of escapism, it’s so fucking inefficient and resource-intensive, we should punch ourselves in the dick just for falling for that each time.

    While having this mindset, knowing rationally what I know, I still expect to fall for it in the medium term again, because fuck me if some work just isn’t boring.

    And every time the excursion leaves me feeling so ashamed and dirty, I truly would deserve a punch right in the dick. And perhaps need one, to actually make this stick…

    I’ve not heard a single capable person ever come out of using the current agents, or “ai”s in general, and not have ended up just wasting time and resources and feeling dirty and embarrassed for it.

    The only thing good about them is the potential, which, at least currently, never materializes.

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  • [–] 17 points 11 months ago (1 child)
  • [–] 5 points 11 months ago

    Fully agreed. The huge front runners will never recoup the cost of their training, especially since the result is just being used to train the more efficient models.

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  • [–] 3 points 11 months ago

    In my future utopia, the homeless are living in hollowed-out data centers.

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  • [–] 3 points 11 months ago

    AI is a military/political control/fossil energy project. Purpose of spending is purely for dominance ambitions, and government will (over)spend what is needed to use the datacenter time. AI budget/regulation items are already part of military funding bills. Remember, if the US does not bankrupt itself in pretense of supremacism, China wins.

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  • [–] -5 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (2 children)

    IBM doesn’t know how innovation works in corporate America, news at 11.

    Of course the entire investment won’t be recovered. No one expects it to. It’s a race, and to the victor goes the spoils. Most of these efforts will fail spectacularly, but a small handful will succeed spectacularly.

    • a few companies will make huge profits
    • everyone else will have huge tax write offs, offsetting corporate taxes for years
    • the rest of us lose
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  • [–] 1 point 11 months ago (1 child)

    That's great and all, except no one is fucking succeeding. They're having to resort to revolving money to stay afloat and OpenAI has current debts going at over a 1.5 trillion.

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  • [–] 1 point 11 months ago

    Sure but it’s reasonable to say it’s too early.

    My company is one example of a paying customer. Someone is earning a significant amount of recurring revenue from us as a customer. This is something new this year

    Those providing companies had better be looking at the usual

    • new customer rates
    • income growth
    • investment
    • forecasts of profitability

    While we have no information as to whether they are properly looking at it from a business perspective, it’s reasonable.

    Presumably the forecasts are insane, as the only way to make sense of that. But time is the solution. Business people are looking at the numbers going up over time: that reality will fix insane forecasts. The bubble will burst when the business people get hit in the face with that reality.

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  • [–] -5 points 11 months ago

    The last "novel" thing IBM did was helping the Nazi's to create one of the most efficient genocides in history. In the last few decades though they just buy existing IP and keep it alive as long as it can make them money

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