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This is just using the AI hype as cover to not get slammed by the markets. If they came out and said "We are pausing hiring..." the markets would rightly be lik
by fdye 3y ago
This is just using the AI hype as cover to not get slammed by the markets. If they came out and said "We are pausing hiring..." the markets would rightly be like "Man they are screwed..."
Expect to see more of this from zombie companies in the future, as long as they spend $20/mo on a ChatGPT subscription somewhere they are probably not violating SEC disclosures either.
- d--b 3y agoThey don’t even have to spend anything on ChatGPT, they can say they’re using Watson!
- gitfan86 3y agoYes, they have done things like this before. IBM is good at PR.
- qbasic_forever 3y agoYep if you read what the CEO said the quote was that they "could" replace workers with AI over five years and as the tech improves. That's just pure speculation and bullshitting, like when Elon said Tesla cars will be fully self driving vehicles in five years. It's market pumping talk from a company with a vested interest in selling "AI" to enterprises.
- RoyGBivCap 3y ago[flagged]
- hraedon 3y agoI mean, are they wrong? Elon promised coast-to-coast summoning in 2016 with a time horizon of two years! there were supposed to be a million telsa robotaxis by the end of 2020! Like, putting aside everything else, it had to have been very obvious internally that neither of those goals were plausible in that timeframe without miracles happening.
- RoyGBivCap 3y agoIt's completely off topic and very culty to bring up Musk in a thread about IBM.
- yarg 3y agoNot really, both (ostensibly) involve hinging company direction on speculation about the fundamentally unpredictable progress of machine learning.
- red-iron-pine 3y agoAgreed. The article is so short and IBM didn't respond to comment. It's a blurb, a CYA for what's going to be an ugly quarterly report in a few weeks.
- kneebonian 3y agoYou have to understand their competitive moat, DoD and especially Pentagon contracts. Most companies don't have the capitalization, runway or people who are so badly broken as to go through the bidding process for something like that.
- treeman79 3y agoYep was at a small startup and the owner insisted we go with IBM, over the protest of everyone. Months of work and we got infrastructure moved over. Only to find out the stack we were sold on was being sunset. Owner insisted we move to the new stack. Month later we were on new stack. This happened twice more.
- ElfinTrousers 3y ago"Small startup" and "IBM stack" are not things you hear of in combination that often and I guess this is one reason why.
- red-iron-pine 3y agoAlmost as bad as Oracle
- newswasboring 3y agoIBM is a public company, doesn't that mean they have to give some details to shareholders? I would hope so, this is a big ambitious plan, I hope they have to present an actual plan somewhere. You can't just say stuff, right?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- trifurcate 3y ago> If they came out and said "We are pausing hiring..." the markets would rightly be like "Man they are screwed..." This hasn't been the case with the ongoing tech layoffs though? Investors for the most part congratulate these companies for diligently cutting costs in preparation of a recession.
- theRealMe 3y agoThat is the case for companies that overhired during the bull market. IBM, on the other hand, has been losing employee counts steadily for over a decade. If a company that people are expecting to be losing relevance does a layoff, it’s still not a good sign.
- tempest_ 3y agoI don't even properly know what IBM is now that they spun a bunch of things off. I guess they tossed all the services/consulting into Kyndryl and everything else got to stay blue.
- JAlexoid 3y agoThey spun off only Global Technology Services, which was only IT infrastructure consulting. Most of the business consulting, including outsourcing software engineering, is still with IBM.
- MikeTheGreat 3y agoSo they're a consulting company now? I know they got rid of OS's and laptops a while back; I assume they don't make or service mainframes/minicomputers anymore. Do they do any software/hardware development, or is it all consulting?
- giantg2 3y agoI think they still have mainframes, but that's a few years ago that I'm remembering.
- freetinker 3y agoThis is spot on.
- zod50 3y agoBut the market has actually rewarded companies pausing hiring and doing layoffs. In other words, if company is saving money by reducing fixed salary costs, market appreciates that move.
- belter 3y agoBut it seems Watson is concerned and looking for a new job...
- alfalfasprout 3y agoExactly. As useful as ChatGPT is for a lot of menial tasks, people give humans far too little credit.
- AshamedCaptain 3y agoDropbox gave more or less the same excuse a week ago...
- ElfinTrousers 3y agoMy first guess was, if they'd decided on a hiring freeze a year ago instead of now, they would have said it was because of NFTs.