But hardware to run them is conveniently something IBM would be happy to sell you.

Good enough for the old world, but I'm not so sure it's good enough for what's coming.

Can we please stop giving weight to CEOs talking their book? Like of course IBM wants you to think this, it would be great for them if it’s true. And maybe it is true! But IBM’s CEO saying it’s true tells me just as much as if a frontier lab said it’s not: nothing.

  While he thinks most businesses can build useful AI infrastructure in just two or three racks, he feels many will struggle to get it running.

  “The question becomes: how do you do that?” he said. “The question that the enterprise struggles with is: ‘Where are my kernel engineers? Where are the people who worry about the underlying network? Who can make sure that the model is clustered on GPUs that are close to each other in network proximity? Who can make sure that you’re doing the right caching of results so you get an incredible response?’”

Has he heard of “agentic AI”? You simply fire up Claude or ChatGPT and ask it how to do all of the above.

It's absolutely true. I have three different setups here, a rig with 8 gpus that I use in either one of two modes (all 8, very heavy model or just one much lighter) and two DGX sparks. I haven't used a paid model in months. Sure, they use a few more tokens and the results may be slightly less good (but this doesn't really matter because I'm still in the loop so it is easy to correct). But the fact that I'm not sharing my work with the paid providers is much more to my liking than having big brother looking over my shoulder at every step and occasionally giving me the 'I can't let you do that, Jacques' treatment.

Considering the disclosed numbers for DeepInfer and the usefulness/popularity of DeepSeek 4.1 Flash, I expect it is inevitable that more companies are going to consider the self-hosting option seriously, and perhaps play with the idea of offering inference as a vendor.

RIP frontier AI, the top customers can easily self host