Jefferies gives IBM Watson a Wall Street reality check
41–50 of 295 posts
Re: Jefferies gives IBM Watson a Wall Street reality check
#42I 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.
Watson, is that you?
Re: Jefferies gives IBM Watson a Wall Street reality check
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
Disclosure: I work in developer advocacy at IBM. Thank you for sharing your view. If you'd like to talk more about how we can better message our offerings, please feel free to reach out. I'd love to learn more about the kinds of problems you are trying to solve. Edit: yes, I know, this is a bland response to the parent. But change needs feedback. Edit 2: thanks matt4077
What makes you think I am trying to solve?
In the jobs I've held, getting asked by the CEO to look into a technology means there is some underlying problem or opportunity.
Re: Jefferies gives IBM Watson a Wall Street reality check
#44IBM 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…
Disclosure: I work in developer advocacy at IBM. Thank you for sharing your view. If you'd like to talk more about how we can better message our offerings, please feel free to reach out. I'd love to learn more about the kinds of problems you are trying to solve. Edit: yes, I know, this is a bland response to the parent. But change needs feedback. Edit 2: thanks matt4077
Here's some feedback: sentences like "getting feedback is essential toward driving change" are the reason nobody likes IBM.
"Change", as used here, is a noun based on the verb "to change". If your sentence calls for a verb, you can just go back to the original "to change".
Something isn't essential "toward" something else. It is essential "for" something else.
"is essential" is unnecessarily passive. Use active verbs.
"getting feedback" is slightly wrong, because what you need is the feedback, not the act of getting it.
"At the same time" is used here because it sounds smarter than "but". Don't do that.
Try this: "Change needs feedback".
Re: Jefferies gives IBM Watson a Wall Street reality check
#45IBM 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…
Disclosure: I work in developer advocacy at IBM. Thank you for sharing your view. If you'd like to talk more about how we can better message our offerings, please feel free to reach out. I'd love to learn more about the kinds of problems you are trying to solve. Edit: yes, I know, this is a bland response to the parent. But change needs feedback. Edit 2: thanks matt4077
I think before you ask for help from a community like this, you should either offer a reasonable promise that you can deliver better results, or offer to pay people for their time.
IBM's Watson, for me, has been so much marketing fluff that it's in the Oracle class of "only bought by people who don't know better". A profitable business line, but not a problem solving business line.
Re: Jefferies gives IBM Watson a Wall Street reality check
#46> Jefferies pulls from an audit of a partnership between IBM Watson and MD Anderson as a case study for IBM’s broader problems scaling Watson. MD Anderson cut its ties with IBM after wasting $60 million on a Watson project that was ultimately deemed, “not ready for human investigational or clinical use.” Well, can't say I'm surprised. I used to work on that project a few years ago, basically the idea was that Watson…
This basically sums up my brief stint in healthcare.
Every hospital / doctor wants to talk about the wealth of medical information they are sitting on... as you said most notes are just transcribed ad lib, or input into rigid EMR systems, there is no middle ground.
Also the language spoken by healthcare software is HL7 which is another nightmare in itself.
Re: Jefferies gives IBM Watson a Wall Street reality check
#47Within the data science community Watson has long been viewed as snake oil. Glad to see less technical and business folks are finally smelling BS too.
Re: Jefferies gives IBM Watson a Wall Street reality check
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
It didn't bug me until 60 minutes did a full blown 15 minute commercial for IBM on how Watson is saving the world. No I will not leave a link to that absurd piece.
I'm a SWE at Watson Health. What do you think was so absurd about it? It definitely didn't explain the constraints and limitations well enough (it won't diagnose any problem you can have), but for the cancer scenario the segment centered on, the Watson solution is indeed able to greatly assist doctors with a task that does not scale well for them.
Unfortunately its an emotional argument for me as it led to a 30 minute discussion over the phone with my father on the limitations of AI and the current state of marketing from most technology products.
Theirs at least one post in this thread that goes into detail on the limitations of Watson Health (it mentioned oversold capabilities that led to a medical institution wasting ~$60 million dollars, but you would be right to point out that I have no direct examples from memory on why the 60 minutes coverage itself was 'absurd'. If anything its the effectiveness of Watson marketing (and other companies marketing of AI) that gets to me and how it is even becoming pervasive in cultural icons like 60 minutes.
Re: Jefferies gives IBM Watson a Wall Street reality check
#49Only took like 4 years for someone to catch on. I remember seeing right away when they put Watson on jeopardy it was going to be a giant pr stunt.
Re: Jefferies gives IBM Watson a Wall Street reality check
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
What makes you think I am trying to solve?
In the jobs I've held, getting asked by the CEO to look into a technology means there is some underlying problem or opportunity.
Agreed. But the community of problem solvers does not frequently overlap with the community of people willing to listen to salesmen.
Yes, there are opportunities. No, I do not believe IBM could solve mine, because of the overpromise, underdeliver. I would only speak with a sales team, or a PM, if my boss ordered me to.