
Is IBM Watson a 'Joke'? - ahiknsr
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonbloomberg/2017/07/02/is-ibm-watson-a-joke/#7ca7f573da20
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danpalmer
"Watson" is not a thing, it's a brand.

IBM have built several, individually successful pieces of technology, all
branded as "Watson", and used the impression that they are a single entity to
market it as far smarter than it actually is.

Under the hood "Watson" technologies seem to fall into 3 categories:

\- The very successful publicity stunt on Jeopardy. The technology here was
good, although from what I understood from tech talks given by IBM, it was a
bit more brute force than you might think.

\- Custom built software, often for medical and legal purposes, that is
effective, if limited in scope, and comes with a hefty consulting and support
contract. You're essentially buying a data science team at IBM.

\- Productised machine learning APIs, that aren't particularly great, and are
very isolated in their abilities.

(1) is fun but not useful to anyone really, (2) is useful, but expensive and
no better than what you'd get from most other consultancies, or might be worse
knowing IBM's consulting practices, and (3) is too limited to build the core
of a business on, so will likely only ever be used to provide a step up until
companies move technologies in house.

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wodenokoto
How does 3 compare to something like sklearn and pandas?

I'm having a really hard time figuring out what Watson is.

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mannykannot
> I'm having a really hard time figuring out what Watson is.

That is consistent with danpalmer's suggestion that it is a marketing
construct.

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cirgue
Having worked on a project that tried to implement "Watson" in one of our use
cases, I can say with some certainty that it is worse than a joke.

>“If you call IBM Watson a joke you call the hundreds of companies and
startups that have built on it a joke.”

This quote would be damnation by faint praise if it were not meant in earnest.

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ccozan
Can you give some more insight of the project? What problem was trying to
solve and why was Watson chosen?

I am curious, because I got approached by a company to work on a project and
when I went to do my evaluation I met the Watson team on site. They looked a
bit arrogant and didn't want to answer to any of my questions.

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rubyfan
In all this analysis we seem to be glossing over the fact that what IBM is
selling in their Watson platform is not what played Jeopardy. The original
point of criticism is that "Watson" in its current offering is little more
than marketing hyped technology that is quickly becoming a widely available
commodity. That criticism stands true and this article seems to agree that
Watson _is_ a joke.

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randcraw
"As the M.D. Anderson fiasco illustrates, IBM fell into the trap of over-
promising and under-delivering. “IBM claimed in 2013 that ‘a new era of
computing has emerged’ and gave Forbes the impression that Watson ‘now tackles
clinical trials’ and would be in use with patients in just a matter of
months,” Freedman noted.

As to whether Watson will ever be useful in clinical situations? “This is
hard,” opined Stephen Kraus, a partner at Bessemer Venture Partners. “It’s not
happening today, and it might not be happening in five years. And it’s not
going to replace doctors.”

And that's the crux of the problem with Watson. IBM routinely promises that
'cognitive computing' (CC) can solve literally any data-based or science
problem in your business' enterprise. But once you look closer at their
methods, you find nothing special; CC is the same old bag of data mining
tricks everyone has been using for decades. IBM's real problem: Watson brings
nothing new to the table.

At the Fortune 100 big pharma where I work we've gone through several rounds
of evaluating IBM Watson's box of tricks for the value it might add to drug
discovery in the chemical or clinical spaces. And each time we've taken a
pass. IBM just hasn't shown that it has a track record of material successes
in cutting edge AI, beyond what's available most anywhere.

In particular, the plate tectonics of AI shifted with the advent of deep
learning, which came along _after_ IBM Watson won Jeopardy, and which still
seems absent from their AI repertoire. Until CC demonstrates "competitive
competency" in cutting edge AI and not more marketing jabber, I expect IBM
Watson will continue to underwhelm.

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hn_throwaway_99
I think that, slowly but surely, companies are realizing that IBM's technology
is no better than freely (or much cheaper) available alternatives, no matter
how many enterprise-y buzzwords they wrap it up in.

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gcb0
this haven't stopped then from buying palantir services either.

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jgalt212
Chamath Palihapitiya is doing nothing for the perception of VC's as a bunch of
arrogant loud mouths.

Arrogant because they confuse past success with actual skill and loud mouths
because they spend so much time pumping their copy cat investments to get
people to focus on their "me too" efforts rather than their competitors' "me
too" efforts.

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heisenbit
AI as a service is not scalable enough as it takes people being experts across
AI and application domain. AI as a product is probably too challenging to get
right but it is tempting to use as a sales tool. Utter these initials and you
got a conversation going. Mission accomplished. Cost externalized: Company
reputation.

