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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

#61

Post by zoeysaurusrex »

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…

I'm happy to be harsh because I've had years and years of experience dealing with IBM.

Their tools are trash for the cost they want. The majority of their offerings are overengineered and prone to failure in a production setting.

They are pros at selling to non-technical management, all the while IT employees get stuck dealing with the aftermath.

We ended up getting stuck with the IBM version of work item management, called Jazz Team Concert. From the "source control" to the actual setup and configuration, the product was a nightmare. The worst part was when we looked at license renewal. They wanted three quarters of a million dollars for something that was essentially dog shit wrapped in cat shit.

In case you thought I might be on the fence with IBM, I'll add one final clarifying point:

Fuck IBM.

Re: Jefferies gives IBM Watson a Wall Street reality check

#62

Post by filereaper »

xienze wrote: post #25

> 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…

So if I understand correctly, there was dirty/malformed data which was difficult to interpret, and when sent to a ML algorithm not tuned by a domain expert led to bad results.

This applies to all ML work, why is Watson exempt from it?

Conversely if this the canonical failure case, why's everyone so harsh on Watson?

Re: Jefferies gives IBM Watson a Wall Street reality check

#63

Post by mrep »

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…

I feel like IBM markets Watson towards your non-technical business people through actual business applicable problems where as companies like google market their products towards solving hard technological problems.

As a software developer, I follow the technical solutions more closely so I love google, but actual business that results in revenue/profit points to other companies like IBM (based on other comments in this thread) making the actual money off of these technologies.

Whose strategy will pay off more in the long term is anyone's guess though.

Re: Jefferies gives IBM Watson a Wall Street reality check

#64

Post by isubkhankulov »

mark_l_watson wrote: post #55

In the last 6 weeks, I have been called by two reporters (Wall Street Journal and Reuters) for background on AI. I talked with the Journal reporter for about an hour, covering 'everything.' However, the Reuters reporter only wanted to talk about IBM Watson - we just had a short talk. I have seen a lot of negative press on Watson, but really, it can be evaluated like any other API to see if it meets your needs.

the submarine - paul graham

Re: Jefferies gives IBM Watson a Wall Street reality check

#65

Post by xienze »

filereaper wrote: post #62
xienze wrote: post #25

> 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…

So if I understand correctly, there was dirty/malformed data which was difficult to interpret, and when sent to a ML algorithm not tuned by a domain expert led to bad results. This applies to all ML work, why is Watson exempt from it? Conversely if this the canonical failure case, why's everyone so harsh on Watson?

> This applies to all ML work, why is Watson exempt from it?

I'm not following, Watson was most assuredly not exempt from it.

> Conversely if this the canonical failure case, why's everyone so harsh on Watson?

Because they were attempting to use Watson to help make potentially life-and-death decisions?

Re: Jefferies gives IBM Watson a Wall Street reality check

#66

Post by [deleted] »

filereaper wrote: post #62
xienze wrote: post #25

> 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…

So if I understand correctly, there was dirty/malformed data which was difficult to interpret, and when sent to a ML algorithm not tuned by a domain expert led to bad results. This applies to all ML work, why is Watson exempt from it? Conversely if this the canonical failure case, why's everyone so harsh on Watson?

[deleted]

Re: Jefferies gives IBM Watson a Wall Street reality check

#67

Post by bradneuberg »

I've had two encounters with IBM Watson that left me unimpressed. The first was using the IBM Watson Speech Transcription service (give an audio file and get text); the results were pretty bad vs. Google's, for example. The second was in their recent integration into Star Trek Bridge Command (which is an amazing game BTW!); the speech recognition results were pretty bad.

Re: Jefferies gives IBM Watson a Wall Street reality check

#68

Post by filereaper »

zoeysaurusrex wrote: post #61
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…

I'm happy to be harsh because I've had years and years of experience dealing with IBM. Their tools are trash for the cost they want. The majority of their offerings are overengineered and prone to failure in a production setting. They are pros at selling to non-technical management, all the while IT employees get stuck dealing with the aftermath. We ended up getting stuck with the IBM version of work item management,…

Hey man, you're not alone, even internal teams at IBM using Jazz Team Concert have been calling it "dog shit wrapped in cat shit" for years now.

Don't be so harsh on all of IBM, its like hundreds of companies under one banner. Not all of them have the power to influence other products and often times end up stuck with it and cannot move on to other tools (i.e git).

More often than not, customers have higher priority on bugs than other teams dog-fooding the product. Its insane.

Re: Jefferies gives IBM Watson a Wall Street reality check

#69

Post by ellius »

abtinf wrote: post #57
ingenuous2 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm not in sales, nor is my performance measured on any sales-related metric.

I have zero dog in this fight from a professional standpoint, but you should reflect on why your behavior is frustrating so many people here. A bunch of smart, technical people are venting and saying "IBM says a bunch of shit and doesn't deliver." You then come in and say, "I'm from IBM, tell me your concerns and they will be put in front of the right eyes. Change needs feedback." It completely lacks concreteness, humanity, or even basic detail. It's the same sort of pseudo-sales-y cantrip that most of the people here are complaining about in the first place.

You know who got this right? Fucking Dominos, of all companies. They took a hard look at themselves and said, yeah, we've been making a shit product. We don't want to do that any more. So here's what we're doing.

If you want to get a community like this to respond, you need to put the onus on yourself first. Don't go "hey, explain to us what's wrong." You need to figure that out on your own! At least pitch some possibilities. Show some evidence that you've put in the work before crowdsourcing your five year plan. Otherwise you just look lazy and like you want the community to fix your business. And that isn't their job.

Re: Jefferies gives IBM Watson a Wall Street reality check

#70

Post by Swizec »

zoeysaurusrex wrote: post #61
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…

I'm happy to be harsh because I've had years and years of experience dealing with IBM. Their tools are trash for the cost they want. The majority of their offerings are overengineered and prone to failure in a production setting. They are pros at selling to non-technical management, all the while IT employees get stuck dealing with the aftermath. We ended up getting stuck with the IBM version of work item management,…

"Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM"
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