
IBM's Watson 'is a Joke,' Says Social Capital CEO Palihapitiya - lmg643
http://www.cnbc.com/2017/05/08/ibms-watson-is-a-joke-says-social-capital-ceo-palihapitiya.html
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DKnoll
> "The companies that are advancing machine learning and AI don't brand it
> with some nominally specious name that's named after a Sherlock Holmes
> character."

The fact that he doesn't check a statement before speaking it on TV really
speaks to how seriously you should take the rest of the article.

>IBM isn't at the forefront of artificial intelligence, Social Capital CEO and
founder Chamath Palihapitiya told CNBC on Monday, and he certainly isn't a fan
of IBM's Watson.

>"At the end of the day, when you are making deep methodical investments in
technology companies, it is fundamentally first and foremost about the
jockey," he said.

Err, so does the tech matter or not?

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filereaper
If Geoff Hinton, Yann LeCun, Yoshua Bengio, Andrew Ng or any other reputed
ML/AI scientist would have said Watson "is a joke" I'd give their opinion more
weight.

I don't think those guys would because there's plenty of R&D happening at
Watson and Almaden Research Labs.

Seems like everybody's slinging mud at big blue these days...

~~~
Nuzzerino
Ben Goertzel has said (from the beginning) that Watson is just another narrow
AI system.

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erikpukinskis
I know deep AI is the new hotness, but we still don't know whether it will
work. Personally, I think expert systems died too soon, and we're going to see
a resurgence.

I wouldn't be surprised if expert systems + operant conditioning don't end up
being better at general intelligence than all of the fancier machine learning.
That's a very old fashioned view, but I'm an old fashioned guy. My point is
just that we don't know.

~~~
tdb7893
Deep learning has already "worked" on many tasked and has also pushed the
state of the art in a large range of fields. It's not going to solve every
problem but I don't really understand what you mean by not being sure whether
it "works".

~~~
erikpukinskis
When I say "work" I mean "lead to human-grade general intelligence".

Of course for niche intelligence AI has been working forever.

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theviat
And I bet whatever he's selling is ""Exactly like HooliChat, but without the
suck-ass parts."

