Today, I’m talking with Arvind Krishna, the CEO of IBM. IBM is a fascinating company. It’s still a household name and among the oldest tech firms in the US. Without IBM, we simply wouldn’t have the modern era of computing — it was instrumental to the development of a whole stack of foundational technologies in the 20th century, and it still has a lot of patents to show for it.
But it’s a lot harder for most of us to see what IBM has been up to in this century. Watson, the company’s famous AI supercomputer, won Jeopardy! back in 2011. Yet since then, as far as most consumers are concerned, it’s been mostly ads during football games and not a lot else.
IBM has been busy, though, just not in a way most of us can see. It’s fully an enterprise company now, as Arvind explains, and that business is booming. But there’s a huge change coming to that business as well. The AI technology that Watson pioneered, all that natural language processing and the beginning of what we now call deep learning? Well, that’s given way to generative AI, and with it, a new way of thinking about how all the systems that run a company should be built and interact with each other.
So I really wanted to ask Arvind how he felt about IBM investing in all of that Watson technology and showing it off a decade before everyone else, only to have maybe made the wrong technology bet and potentially miss out on the modern AI boom.
You’ll hear Arvind be pretty candid that the way IBM was approaching AI back then was off the mark — he says outright that pushing Watson so early into the healthcare field was “inappropriate.” But his take, as you’ll hear him discuss, is that the infrastructure and research from that era weren’t wasted because developers and companies can still build on top of that foundation. So sure, Arvind says IBM got there a little too early. But he doesn’t seem too concerned that IBM will be stuck on the sidelines.
Of course, I did have to bring up how the AI industry has all the hallmarks of a bubble, and it’s one that I and a lot of other folks, even OpenAI’s Sam Altman, are pretty sure is going to pop. Arvind’s more optimistic — or maybe less cynical — than I am, though, and he’s pretty confident this isn’t a bubble. But you’ll hear us compare the current moment to the dotcom boom and bust of the early 2000s — before the smartphone came along to realize the promise of ubiquitous computing — and how ultimately disruptive all that was in a lot of really negative ways for a lot of people, even though all of the bets from the early dotcom era did eventually prove to be correct.
One other thing I had to ask him was: if this isn’t a bubble, then who’s going to win? Because it feels like Apple and Google managed to keep all the profit from the transition to a digital economy, thanks to their hugely successful ecosystems and app stores that effectively collect rent from the labor and transactions of almost every other player that has an app. If the AI economy goes that way, will there be room for IBM or anyone else to get big from it?
Arvind’s answer seems to be to play a different long-term game, which is where the company’s big bet on quantum computing comes in. That bet still isn’t making useful products for most people, but you’ll hear Arvind explain why he still has some faith. This is a good one; we went a lot of places, and Arvind is remarkably candid.
Okay: Arvind Krishna, CEO of IBM. Here we go.
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
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