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> But I was unaware Mainframes were used for AI. IBM was front and center with AI long before the AI bubble. - Watson won jeopardy in 2011. And IBM launched
by mywittyname 9mo ago
> But I was unaware Mainframes were used for AI.
IBM was front and center with AI long before the AI bubble.
- Watson won jeopardy in 2011. And IBM launched several successful AI products using the tech.
- Deep Blue beat Kasparov in chess in '97. They also had other NN-based systems for playing games.
- snovymgodym 9mo agoWasn't Watson basically a parlor trick though?
- stg22 9mo agoIt wasn't a parlor trick and could have evolved into a useful product doing a small, basic subset of what LLMs do today. The problem was IBM's leadership didn't have the slightest understanding of the technology, thought they'd invented ChatGPT and pushed it into applications far beyond its potential, e.g. diagnosing cancer.
- weare138 9mo agoYeah it kind of was. Watson was essentially an NLP search engine.
- bigbuppo 9mo agoThey should have made an MLP search engine. Those people will buy anything.
- duskwuff 9mo agoDeep Blue was also a bit of a parlor trick. It relied on a ton of special-purpose hardware - literally a rack of custom-made chess ICs. It's neat that it worked, but it didn't have any wider applicability.
- verdverm 9mo agoWas, IBM hired me to teach watson law, what I saw as a mess, more management than developers. I was laid off 5 weeks after starting, the project was cancelled within the year IBM is too dysfunctional to innovate like Big Tech has been
- pjmlp 9mo agoAnd yet Big Tech depends on technology owned by IBM, and also has luck the company isn't one that routinely does lawsuits due to patents. Anything Red-Hat touches, like GNOME, GCC, Linux kernel, postman, anything Java is mostly done by Oracle, Red-Hat and IBM as the main ecosystem corporate drivers, PS3 used Cell,....
- verdverm 9mo agoIBM is more often the subject of lawsuits from their employees I'm 2nd gen, I remember the country clubs and IBM Santa. The company no longer cares about its people the way Watson father & son did. > And yet Big Tech depends on technology owned by IBM The opposite is true too. We live in a highly interdependent and interconnected world.
- gt0 9mo agoNeither were mainframes though, Watson and Deep Blue were both POWER systems.