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Comment by mkaziz | Hacker News Reader

How does IBM keep doing cool stuff like this when every impression I have of them is a slow moving, lumbering, IT services monster that's lunging to provide solutions for Big Business?

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They have kept their research division alive. And they actually do a lot of research, as opposed to mooching from universities or refining what competitors do.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_top_United_States_pate...

IBM seems to be leading in patent awards this year as well: http://qz.com/418068/ibm-has-been-awarded-an-average-of-21-p...

Also note that not all patents come from their Research division; anyone can file for one.

Here in Melbourne, Australia, I believe that IBM research is trying to madly hire science / mathematics PhDs. Here's a press release from 2011 [1]:

  > Each year, IBM invests an average of US$6 billion
  > globally into research and development. The new R&D
  > laboratory is the first lab of its kind to focus on
  > research and development. It is located on campus at
  > the University of Melbourne and will employ 150
  > researchers within the next five years.

Why here? It may be the case that Australia's R&D tax incentive plays part of this [2]. Or perhaps it could be that Australia produces a decent crop of well-educated researchers, while much of the economy is based around extracting natural resources and selling them, so there isn't too much competition for employees. [3]

[1] http://www.austrade.gov.au/invest/doing-business-in-australi...

[2] https://www.ato.gov.au/Business/Research-and-development-tax...

[3] i may be completely wrong about this.

Australia seems like a place that pumps out a lot of researchers but doesn't have the global service export economy to build off of, like other nations sometimes do. Props to IBM for taking advantage of it.

This is pretty much it. Our universities are generally fairly first-rate on a world scale, but we don't have the same information economy that other nations have. You see it often in our medical research where we punch far above our weight. It's good that IBM is exploring the comptuer science and maths side of this.

It's an investment for the future since the mining boom is declining. Also research universities down under do have their niches on global scale (eg. medical research).

This project is actually an example of how they are slow-moving and lumbering. If they implemented state-of-the-art learning algorithms in silicon it would be amazing and potentially revolutionary and they'd have tons of customers. That would be deep convolutional neural nets. Instead they've gone with spiking neural nets, which have approximately nothing to do with the current state of the art in artificial neural networks.

Furthermore, you might be misled by their PR storm. In fact this chip doesn't implement learning at all. The learning is the important part! This chip is merely an accelerator for running pre-trained neural networks, and because of the spiking architecture those neural networks are doomed to perform poorly.

Thank you, seriously, thank you, for pointing out the obvious that eludes so many... Have an upvote...

My understanding is that part of the appeal of this chip is the power consumption. 100mW is sounds pretty stingy to me, but I'm not terribly knowledgeable either. So I think they're trading off capability for power consumption by implementing a spiking net rather than a convolutional.

This cool research (just like Watson) seems like a loss-leader for selling consulting services which tailor the tech to very narrow, specific AI purposes. They're all breathlessly announced as though revolutionary, but none seem generalizable. Still, investing in so many small bets increases their exposure to a big win in the long run...

"How can daddy's job be so boring when his hobbies are so cool"

I had that impression too, but they are turning around. They are ramping up their cloud solutions, doing AI research with Watson and other cool stuff. It is a big 100+ year old company, it won't turn on a dime to change directions, but it is turning in the right direction (and I think rather quickly for such a large company).

I think we'll see good things coming out of it in the future. Certainly seems like I've heard more interesting news items from it than in the past years:

Just in the last month or remember a few cool IBM news item -- Linux only mainframe, switching to using Apple Macbooks internally (they are buying something like 200K units, it used to be a Thinkpad+Windows country only), acquired some cool cloud companies, maybe another one I forgot.

I suspect that their research division is nearly as disconnected from their slow services monster mothership as Oracle's flying sailboat division. And serving the same purpose, brand grooming. (Which both do in very cool ways)

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