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Comment by postalcoder | Hacker News Reader

Seems like tacit acknowledgment that IBM mothership is not the right place for a speculative growth play from both a management and capital perspective.

I’m not IBMologist but I do remember how IBM pushed Watson when it was clear that upper management had no idea what Watson actually was. Regardless of the viability of the underlying technology, it’s best to keep such things away from the consultants.

Also, article is very difficult to read. Bad typeface, spacing, coherence and prose. I found the press release less strained.

https://newsroom.ibm.com/ibm-and-u-s-department-of-commerce-...

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I remember when watson was touted as soon to be replacement for doctors more than 10 years ago…

https://www.henricodolfing.ch/en/case-study-20-the-4-billion...

It's not that the cheating stayed with IBM: Ray Dalio hired David Ferrucci out of Watson to try to make an AI for Bridgewater. The pitch was to make it a very accurate people assesor, but in practice the goal was to tell you who agreed the most with Ray Dalio. The team spent years of their lives taking Bridgewater's money, building basically linear regression on questionnaires, and calling it advanced AI on interviews. It's all documented in The Fund.

I don’t understand why IBM never tried to make amends and reclaim their former credibility somehow.

Do IBM decison makers intentionally want to have that hang over the whole firm and be the butt of jokes?

It’s impressive to have the first major AI platform and then completely bungle it.

Eh, Watson was a classic open domain QA system originally, no deep learning or much of what we think of in an "AI platform" today. It was one of a bunch of such systems that were built in that early 2000s period. They all failed because the approach fundamentally didn't work very well.

Here's a write up of some relevant history if you're curious https://liweinlp.com/1465

Surely access to a Watson in Jeopardy would be a nice way to query "How old is Lady Gaga" or "What is the capital of Australia" at the time?

> Seems like tacit acknowledgment that IBM mothership is not the right place for a speculative growth play from both a management and capital perspective.

I'm not understanding your logic, can you explain?

What I see with the program and amounts companies were awarded is some level of acknowledgment of the current state of quantum research (i.e. IBM is generally considered the leader) and their pragmatic approach that piggy-backs on current technologies (for obvious speed+cost benefits).

> IBM is generally considered the leader

You must not talk to competent people. IBM is very experienced at this grift. I remember when I used to go to conferences in a different field and IBM would announce "state of the art" results that were very obviously done by cheating (making an ensemble model and tuning the weights on the test set). Everyone doing real work would ignore them, and then they'd go sell to clueless midcap companies on the basis of that announcement.

They are either the #1 or #2 quantum company in the world next to Google and Quantinuum.

They also keep getting pumped full of DoD money for quantum foundries and modular systems research.

As the joke goes, have either of them factored 35 yet?

lol, fair point.

Also have any of the "AI" companies figured out AGI yet?

No, but you can run your own models and check it for yourself.

> I’m not IBMologist but I do remember how IBM pushed Watson when it was clear that upper management had no idea what Watson actually was. Regardless of the viability of the underlying technology.

So pretty much like any other AI company in 2026 hunting for VC money?

Well ya, it’s an Indian IT sweatshop at this point.

I now work in an I.T dept of a financial company in U.S and I've also worked at software companies in India.

They are all sweatshops these days.

financial companies have always been sweatshops but it wasnt the case for IBM before dot com.

It seems more like they're positioning for the quantum spinoff to achieve meme stock status.

A speculative growth play,

or an innovation play?

Keep IBM people & policies away from either, to succeed.

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