3 ms·
As someone who's worked on/with teams building various Watson services/solutions over the past 3 years, I can confirm Watson is almost entirely a branding exerc
by krona 10y ago
As someone who's worked on/with teams building various Watson services/solutions over the past 3 years, I can confirm Watson is almost entirely a branding exercise without (from the engineering perspective) common leadership, coherent inter-team objectives, etc.
There isn't a 'unified approach' to anything here beyond the use of various open source machine learning libraries with huge amounts of medical data either licensed or acquired over the past 2 years.
- sangnoir 10y agoWho exactly thinks its a good idea to hijack an existing brand for tangentially related, poorer quality products? Microsoft also does this with Skype and 'Skype' for business. Instead of a win-win scenario they hope for, they instead burn up the goodwill generated by the original product to bear the name. So instead of thinking "Watson, the amazing AI that won Jeorpardy", I now think "Watson, the horrible mishmash of IBM APIs"
- ethbro 10y agoIBM's primary sales channel is enterprise, where branding makes all the difference. Most of the time, the person authorizing the project has no idea on the technical details (and may or may not have solicited internal technical commentary). These deals are honestly mostly about trust. Do they trust IBM / {vendor} has the expertise to deliver the project? Given that it's mostly bespoke integration, branding the entire IBM AI/ML area as "Watson" isn't too disingenuous.