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IBM Has a Watson Dilemma

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1–10 of 49 posts

Re: IBM Has a Watson Dilemma

#2
Watson isn't what investors and the general public thinks it is. It's now more or less some classifier/machine learning as a service plus a dev integration team you can hire to pull it into your codebase (which by the way, is lots of $$$) It is not difficult for anyone on HN to spend a weekend, read a machine learning book, and replicate most of Watson's functionality. It's IBM marketing at it's finest.

Re: IBM Has a Watson Dilemma

#3
post #2

Watson isn't what investors and the general public thinks it is. It's now more or less some classifier/machine learning as a service plus a dev integration team you can hire to pull it into your codebase (which by the way, is lots of $$$) It is not difficult for anyone on HN to spend a weekend, read a machine learning book, and replicate most of Watson's functionality. It's IBM marketing at it's finest.

I don’t know if what you are saying is true.

I do know that in the past, every time I try to corroborate a similar statement made in a similar tone I end up realizing the commenter was presenting a very narrow and biased, inaccurate, and occasionally slanderous view.

So I don’t invest that time and energy anymore. Life is finite.

Re: IBM Has a Watson Dilemma

#4
post #2

Watson isn't what investors and the general public thinks it is. It's now more or less some classifier/machine learning as a service plus a dev integration team you can hire to pull it into your codebase (which by the way, is lots of $$$) It is not difficult for anyone on HN to spend a weekend, read a machine learning book, and replicate most of Watson's functionality. It's IBM marketing at it's finest.

> It is not difficult for anyone on HN to spend a weekend, read a machine learning book, and replicate most of Watson's functionality

Yea.... I'm sure that's exactly how it is.

Re: IBM Has a Watson Dilemma

#5
post #2

Watson isn't what investors and the general public thinks it is. It's now more or less some classifier/machine learning as a service plus a dev integration team you can hire to pull it into your codebase (which by the way, is lots of $$$) It is not difficult for anyone on HN to spend a weekend, read a machine learning book, and replicate most of Watson's functionality. It's IBM marketing at it's finest.

Watson is a term that is now so overloaded with hype that I tend to ignore it. It's worse than AI.

Re: IBM Has a Watson Dilemma

#6
post #2

Watson isn't what investors and the general public thinks it is. It's now more or less some classifier/machine learning as a service plus a dev integration team you can hire to pull it into your codebase (which by the way, is lots of $$$) It is not difficult for anyone on HN to spend a weekend, read a machine learning book, and replicate most of Watson's functionality. It's IBM marketing at it's finest.

you are full of it. Are you sure you can replicate beating world class players on jeopardy in a weekend?

Re: IBM Has a Watson Dilemma

#7
Like much of IBM, Watson was/is a good platform for doing certain tasks, but blown completely out of proportion by IBM marketing. Not to mention that they now explicitly use it as a branding tool ("Watson Cloud", "Watson Health" etc.)

On the one hand, you have Google open sourcing AI tools, courses, adding TPU-enabled machines on their cloud and using their own AI tools to do some pretty neat stuff. On the other, you have IBM marketing deliberately deceiving ordinary consumers as to what its capable of. Its not that hard to take a side.

Disclaimer: I do not currently work for either company

Re: IBM Has a Watson Dilemma

#8
post #2

Watson isn't what investors and the general public thinks it is. It's now more or less some classifier/machine learning as a service plus a dev integration team you can hire to pull it into your codebase (which by the way, is lots of $$$) It is not difficult for anyone on HN to spend a weekend, read a machine learning book, and replicate most of Watson's functionality. It's IBM marketing at it's finest.

> It is not difficult for anyone on HN to spend a weekend, read a machine learning book, and replicate most of Watson's functionality Yea.... I'm sure that's exactly how it is.

Reminds me of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=678501

Re: IBM Has a Watson Dilemma

#9
post #2

Watson isn't what investors and the general public thinks it is. It's now more or less some classifier/machine learning as a service plus a dev integration team you can hire to pull it into your codebase (which by the way, is lots of $$$) It is not difficult for anyone on HN to spend a weekend, read a machine learning book, and replicate most of Watson's functionality. It's IBM marketing at it's finest.

you are full of it. Are you sure you can replicate beating world class players on jeopardy in a weekend?

But that's not Watson is and I think this is his point. Sure they had a great model and data to solve that problem. But this doesn't scale automatically for other use cases. You'd have to create a model for your use case and find training data. Tensorflow might offer better tools for that for free than the ones being shipped with Watson.

Re: IBM Has a Watson Dilemma

#10
post #7

Like much of IBM, Watson was/is a good platform for doing certain tasks, but blown completely out of proportion by IBM marketing. Not to mention that they now explicitly use it as a branding tool ("Watson Cloud", "Watson Health" etc.) On the one hand, you have Google open sourcing AI tools, courses, adding TPU-enabled machines on their cloud and using their own AI tools to do some pretty neat stuff. On the other, you…

I don't understand your point here.

Google is not a competitor to IBM and so there is no "choice" to be made between the two. Sure Google has open sourced some great technologies (as have many others) but they are raw, low-level tools for Data Scientists to use. They aren't OOTB products ordinary people can use.

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