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A decade ago, IBM was spending enormous amounts of money to tell me stuff like "cognitive finance is here" in big screen-hogging ads on nytimes.com. They were a
by getnormality 10mo ago
A decade ago, IBM was spending enormous amounts of money to tell me stuff like "cognitive finance is here" in big screen-hogging ads on nytimes.com. They were advertising Watson, vaporware which no one talks about today. Are they bitter that someone else has actually made the AI hype take off?
- ghaff 10mo agoInitial Watson was sort of a mess. But a lot of the Watson-related tech is integrated into a lot of products these days.
- mikalauskas 10mo agoWhat related tech and what products, interesting to read about them
- ghaff 10mo agoBaked into a lot a Red Hat products including Ansible and RHEL. Not that directly involved any longer. Probably read up on watsonx.ai.
- hn_throwaway_99 10mo agoSuch as? I'm curious because I know a bunch of people who did a lot of Watson-related work and it was all a dead end, but that was 2020-ish timeframe.
- ghaff 10mo agoIBM did a lot of pretty fragmented and often PR-adjacent work. And getting into some industry-specific (e.g. healthcare) things that didn't really work out. But my understanding is that it's better standardized and embedded in products these days.
- hn_throwaway_99 10mo agoNot to be rude, but that didn't answer my question. Taking a look at IBM's Watson page, https://www.ibm.com/watson https://www.ibm.com/watson, it appears to me that they basically started over with "watsonx" in 2023 (after ChatGPT was released) and what's there now is basically just a hat tip to their previous branding.
- ghaff 10mo agoI think that's essentially accurate even if some work from IBM Research in particular did carry over. As I recall my timelines, yes, IBM rebooted and reorganized Watson to a significant degree while continuing to use a derivation of the original branding (and took advantage of Red Hat platforms/products).
- jimmar 10mo agoI don't know that I'd trust IBM when they are pitching their own stuff. But if anybody has experience with the difficulty of making money off of cutting-edge technology, it's IBM. They were early to AI, early to cloud computing, etc. And yet they failed to capture market share and grow revenues sufficiently in those areas. Cool tech demos (like the Watson Jeopardy) mimic some AI demos today (6-second videos). Yeah, it's cool tech, but what's the product that people will actually pay money for? I attended a presentation in the early 2000s where an IBM executive was trying to explain to us how big software-as-a-service was going to be and how IBM was investing hundreds of millions into it. IBM was right, but it just wasn't IBM's software that people ended up buying.
- stingraycharles 10mo agoXerox was also famously early with a lot of things but failed to create proper products out of it. Google falls somewhere in the middle. They have great R&D but just can’t make products. It took OpenAI to show them how to do it, and the managed to catch up fast.
- mikepurvis 10mo agoGoogle was especially well positioned to catch up because they have a lot of the hardware and expertise and they have a captive audience in gsuite and at google.com.
- SamvitJ 10mo ago"They have great R&D but just can’t make products" Is this just something you repeat without thinking? It seems to be a popular sentiment here on Hacker News, but really makes no sense if you think about it. Products: Search, Gmail, Chrome, Android, Maps, Youtube, Workspace (Drive, Docs, Sheets, Calendar, Meet), Photos, Play Store, Chromebook, Pixel ... not to mention Cloud, Waymo, and Gemini ... So many widely adopted products. How many other companies can say the same? What am I missing?
- m4rtink 10mo agoDidn't they buy lots of those actually ?
- stingraycharles 10mo agoI still have PTSD from how much Watson was being pushed by external consultants to C levels despite it being absolutely useless and incredibly expensive. A/B testing? Watson. Search engine? Watson. Analytics? Watson. No code? Watson. I spent days, weeks arguing against it and ended up having to dedicate resources to build a PoC just to show it didn’t work, which could have been used elsewhere.
- ares623 10mo agoIt's like poetry, it rhymes
- 7thaccount 10mo agoThis is going on all over again.
- bitwize 10mo agoAgentic AI really is changing things. I've had a complete change of heart about it. It's good enough now to boost productivity MASSIVELY for devs.
- 7thaccount 10mo agoI think this is one of those things that can be situationally useful, but also come with huge risks to the majority of users.
- edm0nd 10mo agoHonestly I'm not even sure what IBM does these days. Seems like one company that has slowly been dying for decades. but when I look at their stock, its at all time highs lol no idea
- broodbucket 10mo agoIBM is probably involved somewhere in the majority of things you interact with day to day
- whoisthemachine 10mo agoYep. When a brand has tarnished itself enough, it makes sense for the brand to step back. Nowadays, we interact with their more popular properties, such as Redhat.
- darth_avocado 10mo agoThey make business machines, internationally.
- nickpeterson 10mo agoPretty sure they made all their money fighting the paperwork explosion.
- fuzztester 10mo agoThey are in the business of international machinations.
- Sl1mb0 10mo agoThey manage a lot of old, big mainframes for banks. At least that is one thing I know of.
- mike50 10mo agoBasic research and mainframe support contracts. Also they bought RedHat.
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- broodbucket 10mo agoIBM ostensibly failing with Watson (before Krishna was CEO for what it's worth) doesn't inherently invalidate his assessment here
- johncolanduoni 10mo agoIt makes it suspect when combined with the obvious incentive to make the fact that IBM is basically non-existent in the AI space look like an intentional, sagacious choice to investors. It very may well be, but CEOs are fantastically unreliable narrators.
- jayd16 10mo agoYou expect somebody to be heavily invested currently and also completely openly pessimistic about it?
- Forgeties79 10mo agoYeah I was going to say the same thing ha. I get what they’re (the commenter) saying, but one could also argue IBM is putting their money where their mouth is by not investing.
- johncolanduoni 10mo agoI suspect the reality is that they missed the boat, as they have missed tens of other boats since the mainframe market dried up. I guess you could argue they came to the boat too early with their pants on backwards (i.e. Watson), and then left before it showed up. But it’s hard to tell from the outside. Maybe that will turn out to be a good decision and Microsoft/Google/etc. will be crushed under the weight of hundreds of billions of dollars in write-offs in a few years. But that doesn’t mean they did it intentionally, or for the right reasons.
- Forgeties79 10mo agoTotally. Just sort of mulling over possibilities. But I think you’re right it’s likely they just got it wrong
- stego-tech 10mo agoIf anything, the fact they built such tooling might be why they're so sure it won't work. Don't get me wrong, I am incredibly not a fan of their entire product portfolio or business model (only Oracle really beats them out for "most hated enterprise technology company" for me), but these guys have tentacles just as deep into enterprises as Oracle and are coming up dry on the AI front. Their perspective shouldn't be ignored, though it should be considered in the wider context of their position in the marketplace.
- getnormality 10mo agoMillions of people like ChatGPT. No one liked Watson.
- stego-tech 10mo agoApples and Oranges from an enterprise perspective, with the additional wrinkle that consumer tech is generally ad-supported (ugh) while Enterprise stuff is super-high margin and paid for in actual currency. If you assume the napkin math is correct on the $800bn yearly needed to service interest rates on these CAPEX loans, then you’d need the collective revenue of the major players (OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, etc) to pull in as much revenue in a year as Apple, Alphabet, and Samsung combined. Let’s assume OpenAI is responsible for much of this bill, say, $400bn. They’d need a very generous conversion rate of 24% for their monthly users (700m) to the Pro plan for an entire year to cover that bill, for one year. That’s a conversion rate better than anyone else in the XaaS world who markets to consumers and enterprises alike, and paints a picture of just how huge the spend from enterprises would need to be to subsidize consumer free usage. And all of this is just for existing infrastructure. As a number of CEBros have pointed out recently (and us detractors have screamed about from the beginning), the current CAPEX on hardware is really only good for three to five years before it has to be replaced with newer kit at a larger cost. Nevermind the realities of shifting datacenter designs to capitalize on better power and cooling technologies to increase density that would require substantial facility refurbishment to support them in a potential future. The math just doesn’t make sense if you’re the least bit skeptical.
- MangoToupe 10mo ago> Are they bitter that someone else has actually made the AI hype take off? Does it matter? It’s still a scam.
- jimbo808 10mo agoHas it really taken off? Where's the economic impact that isn't investor money being burned or data center capex?
- bncndn0956 10mo agoIt's good we are building all this excess capacity which will be used for applications in other fields or research or open up new fields. I think the dilemma I see with building so much data centers so fast is exactly like whether I should buy latest iPhone now or should wait few years when the specs or form factor improves later on. The thing is we have proven tech with current AI models so waiting for better tech to develop on small scale before scaling up is a bad strategy.
- Den_VR 10mo agoWatson X is still a product line sold today to qualified customers :)
- firesteelrain 10mo agoIBM makes WatsonX for corporate who want airgapped AI
- throw0101a 10mo ago> Are they bitter that someone else has actually made the AI hype take off? Or they recognize that you may get an ROI on a (e.g.) $10M CapEx expenditure but not on a $100M or $1000M/$1B expenditure.
- al_borland 10mo agoI see Watson stuff at work. It’s not a direct to consumer product, like ChatGPT, but I see it being used in the enterprise, at least where I’m at. IBM gave up on consumer products a long time ago.
- CrI0gen 10mo agoJust did some brief Wikipedia browsing and I'm assuming it's WatsonX and not Watson? It seems Watson has been pretty much discontinued and WatsonX is LLM based. If it is the old Watson, I'm curious what your impressions of it is. It was pretty cool and ahead of its time, but what it could actually do was way over promised and overhyped.
- al_borland 10mo agoI’m not close enough to it to make any meaningful comments. I just see the name pop up fairly regularly. It is possible that some of it is WatsonX and everyone just says Watson for brevity. One big ones used heavily is Watson AIOps. I think we started moving to it before the big LLM boom. My usage is very tangential, to the point where I don’t even know what the AI features are.
- nunez 10mo agoIBM has been "quietly" churning out their Granite models, with the latest of which performing quite well against LLaMa and DeepSeek. So not Anthropic-level hype but not sitting it out completely either. They also provide IP indemnification for their models, which is interesting (Google Cloud does the same).