A nostalgic look back to almost a year ago when AK was interviewed by The Sunday Times in the UK.
https://filecache.mediaroom.com/mr5mr_ibmuk/179013/Why%20Big%20Blue%20is%20betting%20on%20AI%20reboot.pdf
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IBM AI is not trusted by many. AI training is key to the value of AI, and it takes on the values of the people training up the AI. After the released video of Arvind and team admitting to forcing and firing managers if they did not discriminate in their hiring and firing of employees, as well as their naming whites and asians as the unwanted for hiring - companies got a great look at a company in which you would not trust the values they would have added to the corpus. I would never use their AI as I would not trust it.
IBM's AI tech is a joke. Until ChatGPT came on the scene Arvin had it buried in IBM Research's basement. The last couple of years has been about how to spin another company's success. It is so transparent and so obvious. "You can fool some of the people some of the time, but not all the people all the time". I doubt Arvind learned about what Lincoln said in school.
Now that every IBMer has had a chance to use it due to these id--tic challenges I think it is very clear it su-ks bigly. It's lacking core features and it's a laughable joke compared to AI you can use in the consumer space that's completely free. I would say we're playing catch-up, but let's get real – we will never catch up.
This latest layoff has been targeting designers who could've made this a very cool and easy to use product which it clearly is not. AskIBM is the most useless thing I've ever seen. It does nothing useful, is not easy to use, and is hampered by stupid limiting engineering decisions because IBM is a run by cheapskates. We aspire to mediocrity.
AI is an excuse for IBM, it is not a reality.
IBM may be a profitable company but it run by unethical CEO and his unethical executives, which makes it an unethical company to do business with. No amount of Bluewash and technology buzzwords from Alvind and his Pipmunks in the press can change that. IBM pays to have articles in the press about their so-called successes in AI and quantum, while other technology companies like Microsoft and Google are miles ahead in the game. Simply moving jobs to lower cost counties like India does not translate into ground breaking research and development. As has been pointed out many times it takes 3 engineers in the US to do what it takes 6 or more engineers in India to do. India is extremely bureaucratic and inefficient in it's processes and not going to improve anytime soon.
At the end of the day you get what you pay for - if you pay peanuts, you hire monkeys.
IBM is on an unsustainable path to failure. Shareholders need to demand more and better results before the company is sold off.
IBM should really focus on what it has been doing very well for decades: enterprise-wide computing hardware. Invest more in Power, mainframe, Linux, storage, and quantum innovation that serves as the infrastructure backbone to run workloads and applications in any organization. Work with partners around data center management and sustainability. I do feel we should double down on what truly sets us apart from other IT and services organizations.
Nobody has figured out how to monetize AI
It's crazy expensive and use cases are mostly on the creative side.
I think it'll take a decade or so before firms start to make big money on AI
Microsoft's copilots are a joke (worse than Clippy), OpenAI is solid but revenue is dismal, Anthropic makes even less, Google is still struggling but they are making some inroads as they are baking AI in existing tools (still no revenue). Consulting is struggling to sell anything AI related as use cases are still scarce and talent/resources is way too limited/expensive.
Anyhow, any time they mention AI and profits - just ignore them
AI reboot ?
You must be joking - Alvind and the Pipmunks can't even sit the sight way on a toilet set, let alone do an AI reboot.
products and buzzwords are not the same. LLM and CG (wrongly called "AI") is not even profitable, it's more like a pyramid scheme at peak bubble stage. OpenAI said it's set to LOSE 5 billion dollars this year alone.
I wonder what would have happened if IBM didn't sc--w up by overpromising Watson, and instead poured as much resources into it as it did into blockchain.
IBM isn't really going all in on AI. Look, we don't have a single product internally that's able to do the jobs of the people we laid off earlier this year. AskHR is a joke; AskIbm is a technology demo that does not do a single useful thing - and is completely hampered by stinginess and a lack of imagination. The latter su-ks beyond all belief.
Arvind is all-in on moving as many jobs as he can, including more jobs than he should, to India. AI allows him to generate propaganda for technology we do not yet have, to bump the stock price up while he executes his real strategy. He has no imagination, no vision, no talent; he is looking simply to get the stock as high as be can before he dumps it. He will leave IBM far worse than he found it.
The AI Reboot in the market started almost 2 years ago. IBM was caught flat footed. Trying to play catchup unsuccessfully ever since.
totally meaningless pool of buzzwords. great minds speak about ideas, other minds spread about people. great CEOs speak about tech, sh---y CEOs talk in marketing buzzwords.