- 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%.
In my future utopia, the homeless are living in hollowed-out data centers.
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.
IBM has a surprisingly sane approach to LLMs:
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Small models
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Economically trained
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Apache licensed open weights
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Geared for tool usage/RAG
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Well documented
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Legal, licensed training data
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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.
“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.
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.
Most corporate-facing businesses have some sense of sanity because they know every purchase of their product is going to be scrutinized to hell by a team of MBA accountants. They’ve got to actually meet expectations versus consumer business which can be sold (and defended) on marketing And hype alone
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.
They also made IBM Watson which was not a commercial success. They’re already familiar with ‘overpromise and underdeliver’ nature of AI.
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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.
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!
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
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.09089
“Productivity gain”
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.
I really don’t understand why lemmy hates ai so much.
because it’s the tool of the oligarchy that enables the oppressors who wish to enslave us.
not just fuck AI, fuck anyone that supports it.
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.
deleted by creator
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!
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
If your juniors can commit slop directly to main the problem isn’t them or the AI, it’s your process.
Mandates to use AI are the stupidest fucking thing I’ve ever heard. I quit a company over it last year.
I don’t get it. Do managers think the guys plowing the fields saw someone go by with an ox an cart and went “I keep hearing about these ox carts, but I need my manager to tell me to use it before I try”? No. The ox and cart was better than plowing the field by hand, obviously so.
If the domain experts don’t feel like a tool makes them productive, forcing them to use it isn’t going to make them productive.
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.
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:
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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!
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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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What community do you think you’re in? Block the community if you have a problem with the reason for its existence.
Clanker spotted.
POP! POP! POP!
That one Community.gif
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
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
