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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

#101

Post by dsacco »

abtinf wrote: post #27
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…

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'm going to pile on to everything else you're receiving here:

> I'd love to learn more about the kinds of problems you are trying to solve.

This doesn't sound genuine. This type of delivery almost never sounds genuine. You wouldn't "love" to learn about those problems, and even if you would, virtually no one will believe you because the same corporate speak delivery is used by people who have no commitment to action.

I know you probably just said this unconsciously, but when you use phrases like "I'd love to learn more about the kinds of problems you are trying to solve", it reeks of a comment written and vetted by a team, including brand/social/marketing/PR/whatever the team is in your org that controls employee disclosures.

I've been on the inside of orgs and watched this PR spin sausage cooked up. Someone wants to respond to a controversy brewing on reddit, oh wait, better run it by the the #social channel and make sure everyone agrees this is our best foot forward...wonderful, now we've essentially guaranteed that people don't feel empathized with whatsoever.

Just solicit feedback like a human being. It's okay to "disclose" that you work at IBM (although: jeez, what a corporate-y way to go about it), but speak to people in a conversational tone that doesn't sound like a customer support Twitter account.

Re: Jefferies gives IBM Watson a Wall Street reality check

#102

Post by blueyes »

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…

The only machine working over at Watson is the PR machine.

It's astonishing how much IBM has spent to achieve so little. Per the Jefferies report, IBM spent $15 billion in Cognitive from 2010 to 2015, not including an additional $5 billion in data acquisitions. Even if Cognitive weren't a marketing buzzword invented by IBM to describe if-then statements, that would still be deeply embarrassing. (You could probably double the number of startups funded in Silicon Valley in a year with $20 billion dollars, and I'll bet you'd get much higher returns.)

When you look at the main open-source AI frameworks, none of them were created by IBM, because IBM was incapable of building them. There are individual startups that have done more in AI, using far fewer resources.

And the real shame is that IBM is convincing rubes to buy their cognitive trash, and the rubes are doing it. And when the rubes' bosses realize that the rubes blew the AI budget and the "AI" delivered nothing, those rubes are getting canned. You can get fired for buying IBM. I've seen it.

There's a Madoff-like quality to IBM's Watson sales strategy. The more they fail, the wider they circle to depend on dumber and dumber money from abroad. They're going after rural Scandinavia. They're selling to 3rd-tier cities in China. Just imagining targeting a buyer with the sophistication of the mayor of Mobile, Alabama. That's where IBM Watson is selling strong.

IBM has been poisoning the well in the AI industry for years, teaching customers to be gun-shy and scared of an important technology, just because they blew their money on a dog to begin with. I don't believe an AI winter will come, but if it did, IBM would be the main culprit.

Even if Watson's many mysterious technologies worked, they would still have a lame business model, because most of AI, and the best of AI tooling, is open source. IBM's trying to sell a secret sauce, even as it declines to participate in competitions that would should how Watson stacks up against other tech. Oren Etzioni has been calling them out for years. [1,2,3]

Anyone wondering how IBM came to this sorry pass should read Robert Cringely's "The Decline and Fall of IBM." It's a company run by a clueless management class, who probably believe the smoke they're blowing up everyone else's ass. That's the scary part: The C-suite at IBM actually bought that hype about Watson, until they started to see the numbers, and the numbers sucked. That's why they don't break them out in the quarterly earnings reports. IBM is not signing up the Watson partners it thought it would. [0]

Watson makes claims to solve everything. But when you dig in with the sales people, the only success story they cite is Memorial Sloan Kettering (MSK). It's suspicious, considering how many other organizations they must have worked with. H&R block is bragging about Watson technology, too, but that's just because they think the marketing gimmick will work for them as well as it's worked for IBM.

The real problem in a situation like this is that very few people have an incentive to get the truth out. IBM doesn't want its stock price to dive. And all the customers are mortified that they failed and wasted their money. And they probably had to sign some non-disparagement clause to boot.

[0] http://www.cringely.com/2016/09/07/carrie-underwoods-america...

[1,2,3] https://twitter.com/etzioni/status/654486809825570817

https://twitter.com/etzioni/status/785639012161630208

https://twitter.com/etzioni/status/861231962853224448

Re: Jefferies gives IBM Watson a Wall Street reality check

#103

Post by zitterbewegung »

While getting my undergraduate IBM said they were going to give an overview of the Watson system they used to solve Jeopardy . I skipped it but there were some professors that went to it. The professors walked out saying that they were using Watson as some kind of marketing term. They gave no technical details either . That's how I found out that Watson was a marketing gimmick.

Re: Jefferies gives IBM Watson a Wall Street reality check

#104

Post by odammit »

blueside wrote: post #82
zoeysaurusrex wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

This sounds no different than my experience with some Oracle and SAP products that we had the unfortunate pleasure of supporting.

Oracle's Responsys is definetly dog shit wrapped in cat shit. I hope you'll never had to deal with that dumpster fire.

Re: Jefferies gives IBM Watson a Wall Street reality check

#105

Post by RRWagner »

tomjakubowski wrote: post #80
blazespin wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It might be more honest if they said "IBM Data AI Division."

"IBM DAD"? :) More seriously, do you think Microsoft would have been more honest if they'd called Windows "Microsoft Graphical Multitasking Operating System"? Or if BMW had gone with "BMW Better Performance And A Cooler Badge But It'll Cost You" instead of "BMW M"? Brand names exist for a reason.

Why not just call it "Watson Systems"?

Re: Jefferies gives IBM Watson a Wall Street reality check

#106

Post by R_haterade »

maxxxxx wrote: post #97
R_haterade wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lol. You don't understand. It's a fantastic way to seem like you're doing something innovative when you're not really doing anything at all. The good ones use it as a smoke screen to cover for doing things that need to be done but that the C-level isn't necessarily going to like, the bad ones use it as a cover for incompetence. The fact that you're more concerned about the truth is why you'll never be on the take lik…

Funny, you say that. Today I got feedback from someone that my bullshitting skills are not up to snuff and that I still have the naive idea that actual results count in the end :-)

Old saying: "Life is hard, even harder if you're stupid."

We were too stupid to catch on that everybody else is lying.

Re: Jefferies gives IBM Watson a Wall Street reality check

#107

Post by UnquietTinkerer »

pgodzin wrote: post #38
ben_jones wrote: post #32

Earlier 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.

I think the 60 Minutes segment was just marketing copy handed to them by IBM (how else could they talk for 20 minutes about cutting-edge ML without mentioning Google or Amazon at all?). Watson is introduced as "an AI" - singular - designed to play Jeopardy and then, after he wins, nobly re-purposed to medicine. Charlie Rose even says at one point that "they taught Watson to diagnose cancer", implying that it was the same Watson who won Jeopardy. The truth is the original Watson is on display in a glass case somewhere and the new "Watson" shares only the name and some of the underlying ML techniques.

It might be easy to understand what Charlie really meant when you are already familiar with the project, but the non-technical viewer will walk away thinking of Watson as a single, coherent entity sitting in an IBM vault somewhere. Conflating ML-based expert systems with anthropomorphic AI is farcical, supporting the accusations that IBM is overselling its product. It is also irresponsible, because it fuels the idea in the popular mind that machine learning is creating independent intelligences rather than mere tools.

Re: Jefferies gives IBM Watson a Wall Street reality check

#108

Post by frik »

blueyes wrote: post #102
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…

The only machine working over at Watson is the PR machine. It's astonishing how much IBM has spent to achieve so little. Per the Jefferies report, IBM spent $15 billion in Cognitive from 2010 to 2015, not including an additional $5 billion in data acquisitions. Even if Cognitive weren't a marketing buzzword invented by IBM to describe if-then statements, that would still be deeply embarrassing. (You could probably do…

> main open-source AI frameworks

Do you mean UIMA, GATE? What else? These are frameworks comparable with Watson (at least the original thing, not the PR fuzz).

Re: Jefferies gives IBM Watson a Wall Street reality check

#109

Post by 0xbear »

Spooky23 wrote: post #58
jimmaswell wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fro…

It sounds like you trolled some kids passionate about a subject to argue for a technology and industry that you don't really understand. Were you prepared to compare the plight of the solar installers who fall off of roofs and get injured to the construction workers injured on the job during various nuclear plant construction projects? Did you count the various victims at Chernobyl? (Epidemiologists project at least…

Why "trolled"? Those are all reasonable questions to ask. This advocacy has real world consequences.

Re: Jefferies gives IBM Watson a Wall Street reality check

#110

Post by blueyes »

frik wrote: post #108
blueyes wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only machine working over at Watson is the PR machine. It's astonishing how much IBM has spent to achieve so little. Per the Jefferies report, IBM spent $15 billion in Cognitive from 2010 to 2015, not including an additional $5 billion in data acquisitions. Even if Cognitive weren't a marketing buzzword invented by IBM to describe if-then statements, that would still be deeply embarrassing. (You could probably do…

> main open-source AI frameworks Do you mean UIMA, GATE? What else? These are frameworks comparable with Watson (at least the original thing, not the PR fuzz).

I was actually thinking of the main deep-learning/RL frameworks: TensorFlow, Keras, Theano, Torch, MxNet, Chainer, Caffe. That's where the action is. And if you're talking about AI today, you need to be talking about deep neural networks.
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