[kristopolous]

I'm actually more curious about IBM. Their granite series appears to be nowhere close to competitive.

They had Watson, remember, it won on jeopardy like 15 years ago? They've been at this for a long time

Maybe it's good at something else?

[tekchip]

IBM doesn't do technology they do contracts. Any "technology" is marketing stunts. They hire a bunch of "fellows" outside contractors to make a thing they can be first at or whatever, do the stunt, then get a bunch of 5-10 year contracts with customers off the stunt. They then fuck it up for that length of time but still get paid due to those contracts. After that space of time the folks theyve burned have moved on, rinse repeat. Pretty easy to look back at the timeline of "firsts" they have and see the pattern.

[JSR_FDED]

Don’t forget the marketing for the new $1B “initiative” (fill in: mobile, cloud, blockchain, AI,…)

Upon closer inspection the $1B is (a) over 10 years, (b) mostly internal cross-billing between departments.

[drob518]

Yes, but the key point is that nobody got fired for buying it from IBM.

[tanseydavid]

"HAL, I want you to train a frontier-level large language model for me."

"I'm sorry Dave, I can't do that"

[root-parent]

Agree that IBM has no excuse. Specially for how long they have been trying to do AI. Although Watson was a completely different technology.

They had to start from scratch, but dont seem to have the management to be smart enough, to stop doing it in house. They could have just acquired a startup that could build a frontier model.

What is also very ironic since their whole bussiness for the last 15 years, has been buying companies a la CA Associates...

Their previous Watson branding and collapse of Watson expectations cost them one CEO, but the current CEO was part of the same team. They just dont learn....

[vunderba]

I view Watson in the same light as Deep Blue, one-offs that brought more prestige and potential share value to IBM than necessarily "moving the needle" in the respective technology.

[greenavocado]

Granite is OK for speech to text (ASR)