Some thoughts about Think
“Think” is a slogan that IBM has been using for a very long time. Since before it even started actually when Thomas J. Watson, who would later become CEO of IBM, first used it at a meeting during his days at the National Cash Register Company when he argued people weren’t thinking enough and wrote ‘think’ on an easel.
So it would be fair to say that IBM has been thinking a long time.
And what it’s thinking about at the moment, judging by the coverage of the recent IBM Think event, is AI. I’m sure it will come as a relief to hear that someone seems to be thinking about it.
Of course, the argument frequently used against IBM is it spends a little bit too long thinking when other, more agile, and nimbler companies are busy doing. And there’s definitely an element of truth in that. But it’s not just the length of time it spends thinking, it can also be about the way it thinks.
This is evident in the company’s approach to AI. At a time when companies like OpenAI and Google in particular are grabbing the headlines for their AI endeavours, IBM appears to have adopted a much more cautious and conservative approach. No surprises there, perhaps, because if you were to use the ‘c’ word in connection with IBM it would probably be ‘cautious’ or ‘conservative’.
This may well be part of the secret to its longevity.
IBM chairman and CEO Arvind Krishna (pictured) highlighted three key points about AI at IBM Think: trust, flexibility and safety. First of all, people needed to be able to trust the underlying AI, he argued, pointing to IBM’s role in forming the Open AI Alliance, bringing together more than 100 organisations across industry, academia and government to create standards and tests. Secondly, flexibility was important to help organisations combine models and deploy them where they see fit.
Finally, safety, which he described as “critical”. Krishna’s argument was that open source was the safest method to adopt, claiming “safety comes when many eyes can look at something, also called open source”. To this end, IBM has been pushing to “bring a lot of capabilities around AI inferencing and deployment into Red Hat Linux”.
Governance as competitive advantage
Marshall Graves, alliance partner at Stone Door Group, was quoted in TechTarget arguing that governance is an important advantage for IBM. “I think the IBM governance piece is huge,” he said, “because people don’t really know how to trust the AI. As a company, if you’re going to choose a platform to build on, you really need to believe you can trust the underlying model.”
Trust is the currency that has traditionally underpinned dealings between IBM and its customers. There’s a reason why people used to confidently state that “no one ever got fired for buying IBM”.
So there’s a sense that playing to the virtue of solidity at a time of huge upheaval is not necessarily going to harm IBM because the threat of chaos is often lurking in the wings when disruptive changes occur.
Uncertainty over the direction of change provided by AI, especially when spearheaded by people whose enthusiasm for the technology sometimes appears to trump any perspective on its safety, makes IBM’s conservatism particularly attractive to some organisations.
After all, we’re talking about a technology where one of its leading lights, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, sought to defend the tendency of AI to ‘hallucinate’ (aka ‘lie’) by stating: “If you just do the naive thing and say ‘never say anything that you’re not 100% sure about’, you can get them all to do that. But it won’t have the magic that people like so much.”
Which might come as a shock to the many people who believed the purpose of AI was to develop an intelligence that could never say anything it wasn’t 100% sure about and had the ability to find answers and solutions to issues that we currently can’t. As I said at the time: “If you want magic, go to a magic show. And if you want hallucinations, take an hallucinogenic.”
That’s pretty much what IBM’s approach seems to be.
The heady, possibly reckless rush to proliferate AI also brings to mind Watson’s warning all those years ago: “The trouble with every one of us is that we don’t think enough.”
Maybe the technorati think it doesn’t matter. Maybe they believe it won’t be long before AI does the thinking instead. But we should remember that IBM’s slogan consists of a word that, until now at least, perfectly sums up what it is to be human because of what we can do that machines can’t. Maybe they ought to think about that a bit more.
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