[mywittyname]

> 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.

[verdverm]

Was, 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]

And 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,....

[gt0]

Neither were mainframes though, Watson and Deep Blue were both POWER systems.

[snovymgodym]

Wasn't Watson basically a parlor trick though?

[stg22]

It 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.

[duskwuff]

Deep 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.

[weare138]

Yeah it kind of was. Watson was essentially an NLP search engine.