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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

#11

Post by bpodgursky »

throwaway111991 wrote: post #2

I 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 fair, the "technical" person at a conference does not mean "engineer". It's like a quarter tier past pure-salesperson. Obviously not an impressive showing overall, but I don't think it should be used as a judge of their technical talent.

Re: Jefferies gives IBM Watson a Wall Street reality check

#12

Post by save_ferris »

I don't think this isn't limited to IBM, my partner's PE firm recently hired a small consulting group touting a "revolutionary, AI-driven" real-estate analysis product that has zero AI whatsoever. It's basically a custom spreadsheet tool that they're claiming to be building AI on top of as they consume company data, but for a few hundred grand per year, they have a basic CRUD app on Azure with a reporting tool using D3 visualizations. But they think it's AI.

It's almost like 2016-17 were gold-mine years for marketing buzzwords and some companies are closing deals with no real execution plan for what they're selling.

Re: Jefferies gives IBM Watson a Wall Street reality check

#13

Post by throwaway111991 »

bpodgursky wrote: post #11
throwaway111991 wrote: post #2

I 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 fair, the "technical" person at a conference does not mean "engineer". It's like a quarter tier past pure-salesperson. Obviously not an impressive showing overall, but I don't think it should be used as a judge of their technical talent.

I didn't expect a discourse on topology, but Compare your X to Y, and knowing more than 1 use case is basic, basic, sales stuff

Re: Jefferies gives IBM Watson a Wall Street reality check

#15

Post by chadcmulligan »

RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #4

Watson 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.

They have great research, but as always with lumbering behemoths they have to earn enough from the tech to keep the behemoth going, and with their bread and butter (hardware and consulting) drying up they're trying to maximise returns and having to oversell their remaining products

Re: Jefferies gives IBM Watson a Wall Street reality check

#16

Post by abtinf »

throwaway111991 wrote: post #2

I 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…

I work in developer advocacy at IBM.

If you would like to follow-up about your experience or to get connected with the right folks to answer you questions, please feel free to reach out to me.

Re: Jefferies gives IBM Watson a Wall Street reality check

#17

Post by _delirium »

throwaway9980 wrote: post #3

IBM 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? Ed…

"Watson" made more sense to me when I realized it was just a branding term for any AI-related product, API, or service offered by IBM, which vary widely in functionality. That fact is not that hidden [1], but their marketing doesn't exactly emphasize it. If you view it that way, "Watson" should just be compared against any other similarly broad AI-as-a-service offering with strengths and weaknesses, not treated as some integrated Intelligence that will solve all your problems.

[1] E.g. they're pretty open about renaming existing things to fit under the Watson brand: https://www.ibm.com/blogs/bluemix/2016/10/predictive-analyti...

Re: Jefferies gives IBM Watson a Wall Street reality check

#18

Post by jimmaswell »

throwaway111991 wrote: post #2

I 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…

Kind of reminds me of these frustrating anti-nuclear advocates that set up a table with some posters at my old college one day. They couldn't give me any real answers why I should support solar wind and hydro over nuclear besides nuclear being "old technology". They had no response to the fact that this state isn't ideal for large scale use of any of the green alternatives or that much more deaths directly result from solar panel installation accidents alone than nuclear as a whole. They couldn't tell me specifically what was supposedly dangerous about current waste storage techniques. The worst part was I googled the organization they were there on behalf of and right on their webpage was an explanation of the failure of nuclear plants in the state to stay profitable (I forget why but it seems really odd since you get so much power from them). I guess they cared more about getting more mileage for less effort dishonestly swaying the local types who are automatically turned off by "radiation" and big industrial buildings.

Was that event not geared towards technical people overall or was that stand an exception?

Re: Jefferies gives IBM Watson a Wall Street reality check

#19

Post by [deleted] »

_delirium wrote: post #8
throwaway111991 wrote: post #2

I 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.

[deleted]

Re: Jefferies gives IBM Watson a Wall Street reality check

#20

Post by salesguy222 »

throwaway111991 wrote: post #13
bpodgursky wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, the "technical" person at a conference does not mean "engineer". It's like a quarter tier past pure-salesperson. Obviously not an impressive showing overall, but I don't think it should be used as a judge of their technical talent.

I didn't expect a discourse on topology, but Compare your X to Y, and knowing more than 1 use case is basic, basic, sales stuff

Most sales people at large corporations don't even know how to put together a quote or speak about the product they sell.

You are lucky if they just book meetings and get out of the way of the sales engineer.

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