Jefferies gives IBM Watson a Wall Street reality check
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Jefferies gives IBM Watson a Wall Street reality check
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Re: Jefferies gives IBM Watson a Wall Street reality check
#2I was at the CogX artificial intelligence summit in London a couple of weeks ago, and IBM were there in full force.
I made several rounds around all of the stalls, and sat at the bar for a couple of hours with friends, and the whole time I could see the IBM stall, with 4-5 people there, WATSON plastered everywhere and nobody talking to them.
So I went over. I got talking to one of their technical people there,
I am highly experienced in Deep Learning so I started talking about Neural Nets, and he went blank, and admitted he didn't know much about that. I inquired about WATSON's technology and he couldn't answer telling me he didn't know.
I asked about the main use cases, and what makes WATSONs offering better than Deep Learning, he couldn't answer, or even compare on basic levels.
I asked him "What are the coolest uses of WATSON you've seen" and he immediatly went into a canned response about WATSON diagnosing cancer (a project I had seen and was familiar with) we spoke a few minutes on that, and I asked what other cool projects WATSON had been used on ... he had nothing, and I mean literally nothing.
very disappointing
Re: Jefferies gives IBM Watson a Wall Street reality check
#3IBM vastly over promises with their marketing. It is so frustrating to have to answer questions from the CEO about why we don't solve all our problems with magic beans from IBM's Watson.
I understand that this is what they want. They want to drive executives' interest in the product, but I believe they do so at the expense of their goodwill with the tech community.
Am I the only one who cringes when these ads air?
Edit: "magic beans" is harsh and it isn't that I don't think their tools are good. My point is that they put you in a position where it seems very unlikely to meet expectations.
Re: Jefferies gives IBM Watson a Wall Street reality check
#4Watson is one of the biggest empty marketing slogans ever. The marketing makes it almost seems like General AI able to easily solve your pressing problems if you pay IBM money.
As a non-expert, it seems like the top end researchers are working for Google(Hinton, Bengio, etc), Facebook(LeCun), Baidu, Uber (ex CMU faculty). I don't really see a lot of machine learning research coming out of IBM comparable to the others.
IBM seems to running on the fumes of it's previous greatness while burning the ship to generate stock market returns.
Re: Jefferies gives IBM Watson a Wall Street reality check
#5I was at the CogX artificial intelligence summit in London a couple of weeks ago, and IBM were there in full force. I made several rounds around all of the stalls, and sat at the bar for a couple of hours with friends, and the whole time I could see the IBM stall, with 4-5 people there, WATSON plastered everywhere and nobody talking to them. So I went over. I got talking to one of their technical people there, I am h…
The real problem is that Everybody is afraid to share data with them because they know Watson will become better at the expense of company's business model.
Re: Jefferies gives IBM Watson a Wall Street reality check
#6I was at the CogX artificial intelligence summit in London a couple of weeks ago, and IBM were there in full force. I made several rounds around all of the stalls, and sat at the bar for a couple of hours with friends, and the whole time I could see the IBM stall, with 4-5 people there, WATSON plastered everywhere and nobody talking to them. So I went over. I got talking to one of their technical people there, I am h…
The real problem is that Everybody is afraid to share data with them because they know Watson will become better at the expense of company's business model.
I agree, IBM would never send anyone who actually knows anything to these events. The developers are locked away for several good (for IBM) reasons...
Re: Jefferies gives IBM Watson a Wall Street reality check
#7Watson is one of the biggest empty marketing slogans ever. The marketing makes it almost seems like General AI able to easily solve your pressing problems if you pay IBM money. As a non-expert, it seems like the top end researchers are working for Google(Hinton, Bengio, etc), Facebook(LeCun), Baidu, Uber (ex CMU faculty). I don't really see a lot of machine learning research coming out of IBM comparable to the others…
Surprising and a bit disappointing from a company that is famous for reinventing itself.
Re: Jefferies gives IBM Watson a Wall Street reality check
#8I was at the CogX artificial intelligence summit in London a couple of weeks ago, and IBM were there in full force. I made several rounds around all of the stalls, and sat at the bar for a couple of hours with friends, and the whole time I could see the IBM stall, with 4-5 people there, WATSON plastered everywhere and nobody talking to them. So I went over. I got talking to one of their technical people there, I am h…
To be honest, if my choice is "I am highly experienced in Deep Learning so I started talking about Neural Nets" and "IBM Watson representative", I start wondering whether it's possible for the whole building to just go up in flames.
Re: Jefferies gives IBM Watson a Wall Street reality check
#9[deleted]
Re: Jefferies gives IBM Watson a Wall Street reality check
#10This and the comments below are really depressing to me. Watson seemed like such an exciting piece of tech and something that had the potential to change the world and now I feel like the shareholder's virus has stagnated it to the point of it being worthless. I've heard multiple stories where the staff that's assigned to demo and talk about Watson have no idea what they're talking about and that the marketing, management, and finance people don't have any inkling as to what is special about Watson. They only care that it's not currently making them boatloads of money, despite the fact that it absolutely could. I guess I'll have to move my excitement to Google and Apple's machine learning attempts.