It’s easy to be a pessimist. Most things don’t work. So in 9 out of 10 cases you’re right.

But human breakthrough progress came mostly through optimists, who tried things no one else dared to do.

Good point. That kind of thinking is an absurdity. Saying IBM dropped the ball 70 years ago without acknowledging that lessons were learned, leadership has changed hands a lot since then, and most importantly, the tech landscape back then was very different from today unless you grossly oversimplify everything amounts to nothing more than a fallacious opinion.

Not even much of an IBM fan, myself, but I respect their considerable contribution to the industry. Sure, they missed a shot back then, but I think this latest statement is reliably accurate based on the information we currently have.

The amount of hate I've received here for similar statements is astonishing. What is even more astonishing is that it takes 3-rd grade math skills to work out that the current AI(even ignoring the fact that there is nothing intelligent about the current AI) costs are astronomical and they do not deliver on the promises and everyone is operating at wild loses. At the moment we are at "if you owe 100k to your bank, you have a problem but if you owe 100M to your bank, your bank has a problem". It's the exact same bullshitter economy that people like musk have been exploiting for decades: promise a ton, never deliver, make a secondary promise for "next year", rinse and repeat -> infinite profit. Especially when you rope in fanatical followers.

I don't want to defend musk in any way but I think you are making a mistake there using him as an example because what boosted him quite a lot is that he actually delivered what he claimed. Always late but still earlier than anybody was guesstimating. And now he is completely spiraling but its a lot harder to lose a billion than to gain one so he persists and even gets richer. Plus his "fanatical" followers are poor. It just doesn't match the situation.

Sounds a lot like "I'm not racist but". There's a website dedicated to all of his bs https://elonmusk.today

He is the definition of a cult. Collects money from fanatical followers who will praise every word he says, never delivers, "oh next year guys, for sure, wanna buy a not a flamethrower, while you are at it?". Not to mention what once were laughable conspiracy theories about him turned out to be true(such that even I laughed when I heard them). Torvalds is right with his statement about musk: "incompetent" and "too stupid to work at a tech company".

I am just saying that he is a bad example because he is a different beast from the run of the mill corporate potemkin-ism.

How is any of that different from AI evangelists, be it regular hype kids or CEOs? "All code will be written by AI by the end of {current_year+1}". "We know how to build AGI by the end of {current_year+1}". "AI will discover new sciences". A quick search will draw a billion claims from everyone involved. Much like on here, where I'm constantly told that LLMs are a silver bullet and the only reason why they aren't working for me is because my prompts are not explicit enough or I'm not paying for a subscription. All while watching people submit garbage LLM code and breaking their computers by copy-pasting idiotic suggestions from chatgpt into their terminals. It is depressing how close we are to the Idiocracy world without anyone noticing. And it did not take 500 years but just 3. Everyone involved - altman, zukerberg, musk, pichai, nadella, huang, etc. are well aware they are building a bullshit economy on top of bullshit claims and false promises.

The last sentence sounds a lot like a (partial?) Ponzi scheme.

Pretty close really. Just enough to buy some plausible deniability I suppose.

> We don't look to Meta, who only a few years ago thought that the Metaverse would be the "next big thing" as an example of failure to identify the future, we look to IBM who made that mistake almost 30 years ago.

The grandparent points to a pattern of failures whereas you point to Meta’s big miss. What you miss about Meta, and I am no fan, is that Facebook purchased Whatsapp and Instagram.

In other words, two out of three ain’t bad; IBM is zero for three.

While that’s not the thrust of your argument, which is about jumping on the problem of jumping on every hype train, the post to which you reply is not on about hype cycle. Rather, that post calls out IBM for a failure to understand the future of technology and does so by pointing to a history of failures.

> In other words, two out of three ain’t bad; IBM is zero for three.

Many others in this thread have pointed out IBM's achievements but regardless, IBM is far from "zero for three".

> Many others in this thread have pointed out IBM's achievements but regardless, IBM is far from "zero for three".

I was specifically commenting in the context of this thread.* I was not trying to characterize either IBM or Meta except with reference to the arguments offered by this thread’s ancestors.

I understood (and understand) that such scorekeeping of a company as storied as IBM is at best reductive and at worst misrepresentative.

* Your reference to “this thread” actually addresses sibling comments to OP (ggggp), not this thread which was started by gggp.