They've got a heap of contractors working to help industry adopt LLMs. It is just classic consulting work, and they'd look like a really great company if we weren't comparing them to literal $2T+ companies losing money hand-over-fist...
They had Watson, remember, it won on jeopardy like 15 years ago? They've been at this for a long time
Maybe it's good at something else?
Upon closer inspection the $1B is (a) over 10 years, (b) mostly internal cross-billing between departments.
They had to start from scratch, but dont seem to have the management to be smart enough, to stop doing it in house. They could have just acquired a startup that could build a frontier model.
What is also very ironic since their whole bussiness for the last 15 years, has been buying companies a la CA Associates...
Their previous Watson branding and collapse of Watson expectations cost them one CEO, but the current CEO was part of the same team. They just dont learn....