A little case history - there were two illuminating threads ~10 months back where several current & former IBM employees commented on the growing disconnect between the reality vs. marketing of Watson - looks like vindicated by today's news:
Layoffs at Watson Health Reveal IBM’s Problem with AI
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Re: Layoffs at Watson Health Reveal IBM’s Problem with AI
#22Is Watson a codebase? Or is it just a brand? It seems to me that Watson is basically just IBM's version of AWS/GCE services (at least the non infra ones). But it gets thrown around as a buzzword so often. The marketing makes it look like there's a single AI codebase that can be accessed through a bunch of APIs, but I would be very surprised if that was actually the case.
It's not the case. A year or two ago some of my friends who work at IBM couldn't tell me themselves what Watson really is. As of today I understand Watson as everything from IBM that can be related to AI, I.e. it includes IoT as well because the data could be used by AI.
Re: Layoffs at Watson Health Reveal IBM’s Problem with AI
#23I was happily surprised the other day when the IBM debater was presented and there was no mention of it being Watson anywhere on their website. They really need to stop with this personification.
Re: Layoffs at Watson Health Reveal IBM’s Problem with AI
#24"Offering managers didn’t have technical backgrounds and sometimes came up with ideas for new products that were simply impossible." Sounds like they drank their own kool-aid, e.g., "Products That Enhance and Amplify Human Expertise," rather than understand the actual limitations and possibilities of ML. And it seems to me that they're still doing it with this nonsense about a human-level "AI" debating stack. The ove…
Whats EMR? (definitely not Elastic Map Reduce)
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Re: Layoffs at Watson Health Reveal IBM’s Problem with AI
#25well, to begin with, the heart rate signal on the logo is upside down :)
Re: Layoffs at Watson Health Reveal IBM’s Problem with AI
#26Anyone know what "RA" stand for? The employees kept mentioning it on the "Watching IBM" blog. I couldn't find a decent match via Google. For ex:
> IBM Watson Health has initiated a significant RA across multiple offices.
Re: Layoffs at Watson Health Reveal IBM’s Problem with AI
#27They should have asked the AI how to save their jobs. Unless of course it's not really an AI, but just marketing hogwash. Surely not!
Re: Layoffs at Watson Health Reveal IBM’s Problem with AI
#28Isn't this just the same problem IBM has had for...well...most of my adult life? I had a contract gig at IBM Advanced Technology in Boca for about 18 months in early 2001-2002. Talk about missing the boat... I was brought in to prop up a soon-to-be-failed project for the Japanese government...basically a "Napster for Tokyo" that would allow paid-for-play C2C song sharing for customers of "the Big 5" record companies.…
Getting a nice check while doing nothing actually productive is soul crushing. Good for the short term but it's a Chinese water torture in the long run. Two years ago at their vegas conference they had a coffee shop that used AI to recommend coffee types. I thought "boy, they don't understand this technology".
Many years ago, when AI was expert systems and "neural networks" were fringe, the main demo for one of the public expert system leaders was the Wine Advisor. You'd tell it what you were going to eat and it would recommend a wine.
Re: Layoffs at Watson Health Reveal IBM’s Problem with AI
#29Anyone know what "RA" stand for? The employees kept mentioning it on the "Watching IBM" blog. I couldn't find a decent match via Google. For ex: > IBM Watson Health has initiated a significant RA across multiple offices.
Resource Action. That's just euphemistic IBM jargon for layoffs.
Re: Layoffs at Watson Health Reveal IBM’s Problem with AI
#30Isn't this just the same problem IBM has had for...well...most of my adult life? I had a contract gig at IBM Advanced Technology in Boca for about 18 months in early 2001-2002. Talk about missing the boat... I was brought in to prop up a soon-to-be-failed project for the Japanese government...basically a "Napster for Tokyo" that would allow paid-for-play C2C song sharing for customers of "the Big 5" record companies.…
> IBM is just too big to get out of its own way Brilliantly put Funny thing is, when it did get out of its own way, what did we get? The IBM PC
...A very successful platform. Just not for IBM.