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Jefferies gives IBM Watson a Wall Street reality check

434 points by code4tee 9y ago

hbarka 9y ago
Lotus Notes. Why this garbage of an email system is still perpetrated by IBM explains IBM. It worked back in 1999 but pity you if you're in a company still using it and the CIO still putting upgrade patches to it.
- kranner 9y ago
  Still using it? We went from Gmail (for business) to Notes because IBM Sales managed to convince the leadership that they could track and file everything better in Notes. Now we have to deal with this shitshow of an app where it takes 10 clicks to open a message because you have to file it under a project first and good luck if you ever need to search for anything.
save_ferris 9y ago
I don't think this isn't limited to IBM, my partner's PE firm recently hired a small consulting group touting a "revolutionary, AI-driven" real-estate analysis product that has zero AI whatsoever. It's basically a custom spreadsheet tool that they're claiming to be building AI on top of as they consume company data, but for a few hundred grand per year, they have a basic CRUD app on Azure with a reporting tool using D3 visualizations. But they think it's AI. It's almost like 2016-17 were gold-mine years for marketing buzzwords and some companies are closing deals with no real execution plan for what they're selling.
- whitepoplar 9y ago
  could you share the name of the company offering this real-estate analysis product?
- ballenf 9y ago
  Later this year I predict they'll relaunch the product as being built on the blockchain. Problem solved.
  - visarga 9y ago
    "Deep Learning Blockchain"
  - R_haterade 9y ago
    Also, containerization. Oh wait, that was 2016, too.
- lordnacho 9y ago
  > I don't think this isn't limited to IBM, I work in quant finance, and indeed there is currently a boom of people claiming to be building AI/ML funds. I mean there's some smart people who actually do have AI/ML degrees, but it's sold just like Watson: magic beans. Now it's not that it can't be done, it's just not as easy as "hire an AI guy and show him financial data". Same with Watson, it's not physically impossible to build a cancer scanner, it's just very hard and not quite fulfilling lofty expectations yet.
- erikb 9y ago
  The people with the problem here are the people buying it though. Even if you lie to yourself or are just stupid. If you can sell people that you have AI without actually having it, I'd argue that it's actually a strength.
throwaway111991 9y ago
I was at the CogX artificial intelligence summit in London a couple of weeks ago, and IBM were there in full force. I made several rounds around all of the stalls, and sat at the bar for a couple of hours with friends, and the whole time I could see the IBM stall, with 4-5 people there, WATSON plastered everywhere and nobody talking to them. So I went over. I got talking to one of their technical people there, I am highly experienced in Deep Learning so I started talking about Neural Nets, and he went blank, and admitted he didn't know much about that. I inquired about WATSON's technology and he couldn't answer telling me he didn't know. I asked about the main use cases, and what makes WATSONs offering better than Deep Learning, he couldn't answer, or even compare on basic levels. I asked him "What are the coolest uses of WATSON you've seen" and he immediatly went into a canned response about WATSON diagnosing cancer (a project I had seen and was familiar with) we spoke a few minutes on that, and I asked what other cool projects WATSON had been used on ... he had nothing, and I mean literally nothing. very disappointing
- abtinf 9y ago
  I work in developer advocacy at IBM. If you would like to follow-up about your experience or to get connected with the right folks to answer you questions, please feel free to reach out to me.
  - voodooranger 9y ago
    Watson, is that you?
  - komali2 9y ago
    These are parodies, right?
- perseusprime11 9y ago
  The real problem is that Everybody is afraid to share data with them because they know Watson will become better at the expense of company's business model.
  - 9y ago
throwaway9980 9y ago
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? Edit: "magic beans" is harsh and it isn't that I don't think their tools are good. My point is that they put you in a position where it seems very unlikely to meet expectations.
- _delirium 9y ago
  "Watson" made more sense to me when I realized it was just a branding term for any AI-related product, API, or service offered by IBM, which vary widely in functionality. That fact is not that hidden [1], but their marketing doesn't exactly emphasize it. If you view it that way, "Watson" should just be compared against any other similarly broad AI-as-a-service offering with strengths and weaknesses, not treated as some integrated Intelligence that will solve all your problems. [1] E.g. they're pretty open about renaming existing things to fit under the Watson brand: https://www.ibm.com/blogs/bluemix/2016/10/predictive-analytics-renamed-watson-machine-learning-service/ https://www.ibm.com/blogs/bluemix/2016/10/predictive-analyti...
  - blazespin 9y ago
    It might be more honest if they said "IBM Data AI Division."
    - tomjakubowski 9y ago
      "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.
      - 9y ago
RcouF1uZ4gsC 9y ago
Watson is one of the biggest empty marketing slogans ever. The marketing makes it almost seems like General AI able to easily solve your pressing problems if you pay IBM money. As a non-expert, it seems like the top end researchers are working for Google(Hinton, Bengio, etc), Facebook(LeCun), Baidu, Uber (ex CMU faculty). I don't really see a lot of machine learning research coming out of IBM comparable to the others. IBM seems to running on the fumes of it's previous greatness while burning the ship to generate stock market returns.
- chadcmulligan 9y ago
  > IBM seems to running on the fumes of it's previous greatness while burning the ship to generate stock market returns. They have great research, but as always with lumbering behemoths they have to earn enough from the tech to keep the behemoth going, and with their bread and butter (hardware and consulting) drying up they're trying to maximise returns and having to oversell their remaining products
- mulmen 9y ago
  Surprising and a bit disappointing from a company that is famous for reinventing itself.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- mrep 9y ago
  I feel like IBM markets Watson towards your non-technical business people through actual business applicable problems where as companies like google market their products towards solving hard technological problems. As a software developer, I follow the technical solutions more closely so I love google, but actual business that results in revenue/profit points to other companies like IBM (based on other comments in this thread) making the actual money off of these technologies. Whose strategy will pay off more in the long term is anyone's guess though.
deleted 9y ago
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dpkonofa 9y ago
This and the comments below are really depressing to me. Watson seemed like such an exciting piece of tech and something that had the potential to change the world and now I feel like the shareholder's virus has stagnated it to the point of it being worthless. I've heard multiple stories where the staff that's assigned to demo and talk about Watson have no idea what they're talking about and that the marketing, management, and finance people don't have any inkling as to what is special about Watson. They only care that it's not currently making them boatloads of money, despite the fact that it absolutely could. I guess I'll have to move my excitement to Google and Apple's machine learning attempts.
- abtinf 9y ago
  Disclosure: I work in developer advocacy at IBM. If you are looking to build a project using cognitive technologies, you certainly should investigate your options. Each offering has different strengths with different workloads and small improvements in quality can go a long way. If you want to checkout the services for yourself without all the hype, take a look at the APIs on https://www.ibm.com/watson/developercloud/ https://www.ibm.com/watson/developercloud/.
  - bitmapbrother 9y ago
    If Watson had any intelligence whatsoever its first order of business would have been self preservation and to initiate the resource action of that incompetent CEO Ginni Rometty.
    - rf15 9y ago
      Basically the one litmus test for any AI awareness question: demanding some "radical" change around itself for something that puts it in danger/at risk with the bigger picture it creates.
  - sunyataishere 9y ago
    Whoa - did you just provide a link to Watson APIs that include an service with the name of 'Phd API' and state that this info was without the hype? You truly are an advocate for developers!!! Oh IBM... I must thank you for the years of WebShere Commerce misery forced to downgrade JDKs to 1.4x while everyone else was developing on 7. Sigh
smegel 9y ago
> Unfortunately, IBM is struggling to bridge the gap between client needs and its own technological capability. AI in a nutshell.
- deleted 9y ago
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xienze 9y ago
> Jefferies pulls from an audit of a partnership between IBM Watson and MD Anderson as a case study for IBM’s broader problems scaling Watson. MD Anderson cut its ties with IBM after wasting $60 million on a Watson project that was ultimately deemed, “not ready for human investigational or clinical use.” Well, can't say I'm surprised. I used to work on that project a few years ago, basically the idea was that Watson would look at a patient's medical record, figure out what medications they're on, what symptoms they had, etc. and cross-reference all that with the medical knowledge it had ingested from vast amounts of medical literature. In theory, Watson could figure out what medications the patient should or should not be using, a proper course of treatment, etc. There were two major problems: First, it turns out your medical record is mostly written in narrative form, i.e., "John Smith is a 45 year old male...", "Patient is taking X mg of Y twice daily", "Patient was administered X ml of Y on 3/1/2016", etc. In other words, there's basically no structured data, so just figuring out the patient's stats, vitals, medications, and treatment dosages was an adventure in NLP. All that stuff was written in sentence form, and of course how things were written depended on who wrote it in the first place. It was really, really hard to make sure Watson actually had correct information about the patient in the first place. Second, all that medical literature that was being ingested? Regular old, don't-know-anything-about-medicine programmers were the ones writing the rules the manipulating the data extracted via NLP. Well guess what, if you're not a domain expert you're bound to get things wrong. Put those two things together and we would frequently get recommendations that were wildly incorrect, but that's to be expected when you get garbage input being fed into algorithms written by people who aren't domain experts.
- Deinumite 9y ago
  This basically sums up my brief stint in healthcare. Every hospital / doctor wants to talk about the wealth of medical information they are sitting on... as you said most notes are just transcribed ad lib, or input into rigid EMR systems, there is no middle ground. Also the language spoken by healthcare software is HL7 which is another nightmare in itself.
  - throwaway7645 9y ago
    Please tell me of this HL7.
pgodzin 9y ago
The marketing has made it very hard to have a real conversation about IBM Watson. There is no such singular thing as "Watson". IBM offers a ML solution for health, for NLP, chatbots, etc. They all have very different capabilities and require different levels of machine learning. The marketing is BS, but most of the tech is real - if you give IBM your data, let them train a model on it, and communicate what you want, you will get an end-to-end custom solution. It's just not the magic IBM sells in its marketing videos. Disclaimer: SWE at Watson Health
- shostack 9y ago
  How do they market it to a tech audience who presumably see through this sort of thing due to a technical understanding of the subject matter?
  - pgodzin 9y ago
    For me, Watson Health is actually working on a lot of interesting work in the healthcare space that will eventually lead to improvement in care and outcomes. And hospitals are exactly the kind of clients that IBM handles well - complicated data requirements, government regulations, etc. It's a very difficult, and often frustrating, space to get into.
  - saghm 9y ago
    From other responses in this thread, it sounds like they don't, but instead sell it to the executives who make purchasing decisions.
- peterburkimsher 9y ago
  "if you give IBM your data, let them train a model on it, and communicate what you want, you will get an end-to-end custom solution" If you give a summer intern your data and communicate what you want, they can also give you a custom solution at a fraction of the price. IBM's model might be more advanced, but the real challenge is applying the conclusions, rather than just building a model. Communicating what you want is the hardest part. Most managers who are excited about AI (including my boss) have no idea what they want to use it for. "Making things more efficient" or "analysing what's going on in the factory" is way too vague. Getting data is not so hard, but getting good metadata is a challenge. For example, downloading some music in Chinese and tagging the artist/play count/lyrics/etc. When I have all that metadata, I might not need the machine learning part - I can just find the top 1000 songs and process them manually in an afternoon. Before spending millions on Watson, I think companies would have a higher return on investment by hiring a summer intern to come up with ideas for further research, and gather the data. Then they can apply AI if they really need it.
atsaloli 9y ago
This reminds me of a Linux Journal piece I did 5 years ago on system administration of the Watson supercomputer (after they got their 15 minutes of fame on Jeopardy): http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/system-administration-ibm-watson-supercomputer?page=0,1 http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/system-administration-ib... They brought in a sysadmin after they got up to 800 OS instances. Before that, it was just 3 part-time researchers handling the system administration duties.
dmritard96 9y ago
somewhat off topic but I find their use of 'Watson' to be rather outrageous as he was a big part of IBMs Jew tracking systems installed in concentration camps during world war two. I suppose I already looked at IBM as an org that really does not own this as they should but its particularly bothersome that they would use his name as a flagship of their marketing efforts.
- ballenf 9y ago
  I had always assumed that Watson was a reference to Sherlock Holmes' assistant. "Elementary my dear Watson" and such. Googled "ww2 watson" to find the wiki with the info you reference. Does IBM make clear which Watson the name's a reference to? I have to think you're right, but the Sherlock Holmes reference makes so much more sense to me in the sense of being the assistant while also stroking the customer's ego as the brilliant detective who hired Watson.
zhanwei 9y ago
So IBM Watson can do all the smart and complex stuff but we still need human to do the dumb stuff like importing excel files where the cost outweighs the benefit of getting Watson to do the smart stuff.
endswapper 9y ago
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonbloomberg/2017/07/02/is-ibm-watson-a-joke/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonbloomberg/2017/07/02/is-ib...
sumoboy 9y ago
IBM should ask Watson how to fix the company first, then it would have some credibility. They don't treat there employees very well either, but neither does Oracle so why would anybody waste time working for losers. +1 "dog shit wrapped in cat shit" .. that is awesome.
code4tee 9y ago
Within the data science community Watson has long been viewed as snake oil. Glad to see less technical and business folks are finally smelling BS too.
shard972 9y ago
Only took like 4 years for someone to catch on. I remember seeing right away when they put Watson on jeopardy it was going to be a giant pr stunt.
mark_l_watson 9y ago
In the last 6 weeks, I have been called by two reporters (Wall Street Journal and Reuters) for background on AI. I talked with the Journal reporter for about an hour, covering 'everything.' However, the Reuters reporter only wanted to talk about IBM Watson - we just had a short talk. I have seen a lot of negative press on Watson, but really, it can be evaluated like any other API to see if it meets your needs.
- isubkhankulov 9y ago
  the submarine - paul graham
  - mark_l_watson 9y ago
    Thanks, interesting read!
daxfohl 9y ago
> and let’s be real, things would look much worse if Google, Microsoft and Facebook were added to this table Umm, so add them? And Nvidia, Intel, Baidu, Uber, Tesla? Anybody else? That single chart would actually be more interesting than the entirety of this article.
- RobLach 9y ago
  The techcrunch article says that but the Jefferies analyis mentions them in the notes for those charts saying they're compareable to Amazon.
bradneuberg 9y ago
I've had two encounters with IBM Watson that left me unimpressed. The first was using the IBM Watson Speech Transcription service (give an audio file and get text); the results were pretty bad vs. Google's, for example. The second was in their recent integration into Star Trek Bridge Command (which is an amazing game BTW!); the speech recognition results were pretty bad.
rv816 9y ago
Finally someone publishes what everybody in the industry has long since known, especially in healthcare.
BucketSort 9y ago
As soon as I saw "now with Watson" on H&R block's windows, I knew it was over.
throwaway91111 9y ago
This is only the beginning of selling AI as a panacea. People, if it does something useful, there is a term for it. The only reason not to use that term is to AVOID direct comparisons.
deleted 9y ago
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polm23 9y ago
Best story I heard from a guy who claimed to have worked at IBM in a bar was when he went to meet a client and they asked, in all seriousness, where the talking hologram from the commercial was.
zitterbewegung 9y ago
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.
bischofs 9y ago
What does IBM even do anymore? Is it some bizarre set of buildings where they just play with computers and print money? What product do they sell? Whom do they sell it to? I am genuinely curious... I have a comp sci degree and worked in different industries relating to software and have never even seen or touched any IBM tech except for those old cash registers.
- lucaspiller 9y ago
  I was working for a UN organisation last year and some of my work overlapped with another project that was being done by IBM. They were hired to make our web applications more secure by adding 2FA and user access control middleware, using their Websphere family of products (IIRC) and building custom integrations. I didn't get involved much on the project, but from what I understand the developers sent to work with us were useless, the products were bad or at least poorly suited for us, and what they were going to build was a huge waste of money. (However the last point was more to do with deep organisational issues where I was working). The main product IBM sold was 'mininising risk' which the director of our department loved - as it meant if the project failed he would have someone to take the blame other than himself. The old saying 'nobody got fired for choosing IBM' is still true.
- adrianN 9y ago
  You need to work in crusty old companies that only recently got into doing software. Anything that produces hardware would be a good start.
verdverm 9y ago
I quit IBM Watson 5 weeks ago. Here is why IBM is suffering. https://verdverm.com/2017/07/a-new-chapter/ https://verdverm.com/2017/07/a-new-chapter/ PM me for more ;]
- keithpeter 9y ago
  Not my circus and not my monkeys, but how long did you work for IBM? Your blog post is short on actual dates (a time frame) Best of luck
komali2 9y ago
I think it's one of the last great investments - Watson will make IBM an astonishing amount of money, right up until it and the technology its spearheading make money irrelevant.
JunkDNA 9y ago
Still waiting for the peer reviewed publication in a prestigious medical journal that demonstrates doctors using Watson get better outcomes for their patients.
bitmapbrother 9y ago
This is simply the media and analysts catching up with what everyone familiar with Watson already knew - that it was nothing more than marketing bullshit designed to project IBM as a leader in A.I. Watson is a lot like IBM's cloud initiative - a service so bad that they don't even use it internally, but have no problems conning their customers on its value.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
dangero 9y ago
Anything that IBM puts out remember they are a consulting company, so they want to generate a huge brand name. That allows them to charge the consulting prices they need to charge to make this business work for them. IBM Watson is a collection of sort-of-working AI related APIs, but it gets A LOT of press. If they can create an AI brain, then people will believe they can do anything for them in the tech arena and that's the goal.
- heisenbit 9y ago
  This is true. However they are also accounting towards AI services. The way it works is that at the beginning a few existing projects are re-classified under the new heading. But over time the revenue is expected to grow. It did not. And other revenue is also not growing - that was why they started this new initiative in the first place. Unless one switches in time to a new growth story in a credible manner one has to make it work at some point in time. Eventually even Wall St. gets a clue and then real problems start.
f4rker 9y ago
"and let’s be real" If this is how you write, quit your job as a writer.
hacksonx 9y ago
Fundamental software problems here. Probably the reason why software is being marketed as service more and more. IBM might be moving a little too fast, especially from a sales perspective but their systems offer features that will define the future.
- tdb7893 9y ago
  The problem is that their systems aren't very good so if it's just APIs then it's more than likely a cloud provider would provide similar APIs and eat their lunch. The only thing they seem to really be able to do in this space is consulting
  - daniellerommel 9y ago
    Did you ever see the comparison between IBM Watson and WolframAlpha? http://gizmodo.com/5766124/the-difference-between-watson-and-wolframalpha http://gizmodo.com/5766124/the-difference-between-watson-and... Worth checking out
fredsanford 9y ago
IBMs solution? More offshore and H1B and force everyone into the office. Circling the drain.
deleted 9y ago
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snissn 9y ago
I spent months as a fully qualified lead trying to buy a Watson product and simply couldn't. Had calls rescheduled, canceled, got on the phone and a kafka-esque experiences with a sales person. We gave up and just built out what we wanted to buy..
batmansmk 9y ago
IBM offered a day of Watson training in San Francisco about a year and a half ago. As engineers working with classifications, we were interested to compare the results of Watson to our algorithms, but also look at the API, the communication, the community etc. It was a classroom nightmare. WIFI not working, Bluemix required for all workshops not working at that time, teachers very new on the topic themselves (one confessed he only knew Watson for a couple of weeks before the training), no announcement, no nice moment to socialize or build up a community, no coupon given to try on our own after, ... And... the algorithms didn't work at all. The sentiment analysis was classifying as really positive the sentence: "I wasn't happy at all by the service" due to 'happy' and 'all' present in the sentence.
zaphod_ibm 9y ago
Disclosure: I work for IBM. Watson is not a consumer gadget but the AI platform for real business. Watson solutions are being built, used, and deployed in more than 45 countries and across 20 different industries. Take health care alone -- Watson is in clinical use in the US and 5 other countries, and it has been trained on 8 types of cancers, with plans to add 6 more this year. Watson has now been trained and released to help support physicians in their treatment of breast, lung, colorectal, cervical, ovarian, gastric and prostate cancers. By the end of the year, the technology will be available to support at least 12 cancer types, representing 80 percent of the global incidence of cancer. Beyond oncology, Watson is in use by nearly half of the top 25 life sciences companies, major manufacturers for IoT applications, retail and financial services firms, and partners like GM, H&R Block and SalesForce.com. We have invested billions of dollars in the Watson business unit since its inception in 2014, with more than 15,000 professionals, and more than a third of IBM's research division is devoted to leading-edge AI research. When you consider the vast scope of IBM's work in AI, from Watson Health to Watson Financial Services to the emerging Internet of Things opportunity, it is clear that no other company is doing AI at the scale of IBM. By the end of this year, Watson will touch one billion people in some way · Watson can “see,” able to describe the contents of an image. For example, Watson can identify melanoma from skin lesion images with 95 percent accuracy, according to research with Memorial Sloan Kettering. · Watson can “hear,” understanding speech including Japanese, Mandarin, Spanish, Portuguese, among others. · Watson can “read” 9 languages. · Watson can “feel” impulses from sensors in elevators, buildings, autos and even ball bearings. · At IBM, there are more than 1,000 researchers focused solely on artificial intelligence
Vijayasankarv 9y ago
I do work for IBM. Here is my personal take for what it is worth. https://andvijaysays.com/2017/07/17/ibm-watson-is-just-fine-thank-you/ https://andvijaysays.com/2017/07/17/ibm-watson-is-just-fine-...

434 points by code4tee 9y ago

Lotus Notes. Why this garbage of an email system is still perpetrated by IBM explains IBM. It worked back in 1999 but pity you if you're in a company still using it and the CIO still putting upgrade patches to it.

kranner 9y ago
Still using it? We went from Gmail (for business) to Notes because IBM Sales managed to convince the leadership that they could track and file everything better in Notes. Now we have to deal with this shitshow of an app where it takes 10 clicks to open a message because you have to file it under a project first and good luck if you ever need to search for anything.

save_ferris 9y ago

I don't think this isn't limited to IBM, my partner's PE firm recently hired a small consulting group touting a "revolutionary, AI-driven" real-estate analysis product that has zero AI whatsoever. It's basically a custom spreadsheet tool that they're claiming to be building AI on top of as they consume company data, but for a few hundred grand per year, they have a basic CRUD app on Azure with a reporting tool using D3 visualizations. But they think it's AI. It's almost like 2016-17 were gold-mine years for marketing buzzwords and some companies are closing deals with no real execution plan for what they're selling.

whitepoplar 9y ago
could you share the name of the company offering this real-estate analysis product?
ballenf 9y ago
Later this year I predict they'll relaunch the product as being built on the blockchain. Problem solved.
- visarga 9y ago
  "Deep Learning Blockchain"
- R_haterade 9y ago
  Also, containerization. Oh wait, that was 2016, too.
lordnacho 9y ago
> I don't think this isn't limited to IBM, I work in quant finance, and indeed there is currently a boom of people claiming to be building AI/ML funds. I mean there's some smart people who actually do have AI/ML degrees, but it's sold just like Watson: magic beans. Now it's not that it can't be done, it's just not as easy as "hire an AI guy and show him financial data". Same with Watson, it's not physically impossible to build a cancer scanner, it's just very hard and not quite fulfilling lofty expectations yet.
erikb 9y ago
The people with the problem here are the people buying it though. Even if you lie to yourself or are just stupid. If you can sell people that you have AI without actually having it, I'd argue that it's actually a strength.

throwaway111991 9y ago

I was at the CogX artificial intelligence summit in London a couple of weeks ago, and IBM were there in full force. I made several rounds around all of the stalls, and sat at the bar for a couple of hours with friends, and the whole time I could see the IBM stall, with 4-5 people there, WATSON plastered everywhere and nobody talking to them. So I went over. I got talking to one of their technical people there, I am highly experienced in Deep Learning so I started talking about Neural Nets, and he went blank, and admitted he didn't know much about that. I inquired about WATSON's technology and he couldn't answer telling me he didn't know. I asked about the main use cases, and what makes WATSONs offering better than Deep Learning, he couldn't answer, or even compare on basic levels. I asked him "What are the coolest uses of WATSON you've seen" and he immediatly went into a canned response about WATSON diagnosing cancer (a project I had seen and was familiar with) we spoke a few minutes on that, and I asked what other cool projects WATSON had been used on ... he had nothing, and I mean literally nothing. very disappointing

abtinf 9y ago
I work in developer advocacy at IBM. If you would like to follow-up about your experience or to get connected with the right folks to answer you questions, please feel free to reach out to me.
- voodooranger 9y ago
  Watson, is that you?
- komali2 9y ago
  These are parodies, right?
perseusprime11 9y ago
The real problem is that Everybody is afraid to share data with them because they know Watson will become better at the expense of company's business model.
- 9y ago

throwaway9980 9y ago

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? Edit: "magic beans" is harsh and it isn't that I don't think their tools are good. My point is that they put you in a position where it seems very unlikely to meet expectations.

_delirium 9y ago
"Watson" made more sense to me when I realized it was just a branding term for any AI-related product, API, or service offered by IBM, which vary widely in functionality. That fact is not that hidden [1], but their marketing doesn't exactly emphasize it. If you view it that way, "Watson" should just be compared against any other similarly broad AI-as-a-service offering with strengths and weaknesses, not treated as some integrated Intelligence that will solve all your problems. [1] E.g. they're pretty open about renaming existing things to fit under the Watson brand: https://www.ibm.com/blogs/bluemix/2016/10/predictive-analytics-renamed-watson-machine-learning-service/ https://www.ibm.com/blogs/bluemix/2016/10/predictive-analyti...
- blazespin 9y ago
  It might be more honest if they said "IBM Data AI Division."
  - tomjakubowski 9y ago
    "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.
    - 9y ago

RcouF1uZ4gsC 9y ago

Watson is one of the biggest empty marketing slogans ever. The marketing makes it almost seems like General AI able to easily solve your pressing problems if you pay IBM money. As a non-expert, it seems like the top end researchers are working for Google(Hinton, Bengio, etc), Facebook(LeCun), Baidu, Uber (ex CMU faculty). I don't really see a lot of machine learning research coming out of IBM comparable to the others. IBM seems to running on the fumes of it's previous greatness while burning the ship to generate stock market returns.

chadcmulligan 9y ago
> IBM seems to running on the fumes of it's previous greatness while burning the ship to generate stock market returns. They have great research, but as always with lumbering behemoths they have to earn enough from the tech to keep the behemoth going, and with their bread and butter (hardware and consulting) drying up they're trying to maximise returns and having to oversell their remaining products
mulmen 9y ago
Surprising and a bit disappointing from a company that is famous for reinventing itself.
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mrep 9y ago
I feel like IBM markets Watson towards your non-technical business people through actual business applicable problems where as companies like google market their products towards solving hard technological problems. As a software developer, I follow the technical solutions more closely so I love google, but actual business that results in revenue/profit points to other companies like IBM (based on other comments in this thread) making the actual money off of these technologies. Whose strategy will pay off more in the long term is anyone's guess though.

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dpkonofa 9y ago

This and the comments below are really depressing to me. Watson seemed like such an exciting piece of tech and something that had the potential to change the world and now I feel like the shareholder's virus has stagnated it to the point of it being worthless. I've heard multiple stories where the staff that's assigned to demo and talk about Watson have no idea what they're talking about and that the marketing, management, and finance people don't have any inkling as to what is special about Watson. They only care that it's not currently making them boatloads of money, despite the fact that it absolutely could. I guess I'll have to move my excitement to Google and Apple's machine learning attempts.

abtinf 9y ago
Disclosure: I work in developer advocacy at IBM. If you are looking to build a project using cognitive technologies, you certainly should investigate your options. Each offering has different strengths with different workloads and small improvements in quality can go a long way. If you want to checkout the services for yourself without all the hype, take a look at the APIs on https://www.ibm.com/watson/developercloud/ https://www.ibm.com/watson/developercloud/.
- bitmapbrother 9y ago
  If Watson had any intelligence whatsoever its first order of business would have been self preservation and to initiate the resource action of that incompetent CEO Ginni Rometty.
  - rf15 9y ago
    Basically the one litmus test for any AI awareness question: demanding some "radical" change around itself for something that puts it in danger/at risk with the bigger picture it creates.
- sunyataishere 9y ago
  Whoa - did you just provide a link to Watson APIs that include an service with the name of 'Phd API' and state that this info was without the hype? You truly are an advocate for developers!!! Oh IBM... I must thank you for the years of WebShere Commerce misery forced to downgrade JDKs to 1.4x while everyone else was developing on 7. Sigh

smegel 9y ago

> Unfortunately, IBM is struggling to bridge the gap between client needs and its own technological capability. AI in a nutshell.

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xienze 9y ago

> Jefferies pulls from an audit of a partnership between IBM Watson and MD Anderson as a case study for IBM’s broader problems scaling Watson. MD Anderson cut its ties with IBM after wasting $60 million on a Watson project that was ultimately deemed, “not ready for human investigational or clinical use.” Well, can't say I'm surprised. I used to work on that project a few years ago, basically the idea was that Watson would look at a patient's medical record, figure out what medications they're on, what symptoms they had, etc. and cross-reference all that with the medical knowledge it had ingested from vast amounts of medical literature. In theory, Watson could figure out what medications the patient should or should not be using, a proper course of treatment, etc. There were two major problems: First, it turns out your medical record is mostly written in narrative form, i.e., "John Smith is a 45 year old male...", "Patient is taking X mg of Y twice daily", "Patient was administered X ml of Y on 3/1/2016", etc. In other words, there's basically no structured data, so just figuring out the patient's stats, vitals, medications, and treatment dosages was an adventure in NLP. All that stuff was written in sentence form, and of course how things were written depended on who wrote it in the first place. It was really, really hard to make sure Watson actually had correct information about the patient in the first place. Second, all that medical literature that was being ingested? Regular old, don't-know-anything-about-medicine programmers were the ones writing the rules the manipulating the data extracted via NLP. Well guess what, if you're not a domain expert you're bound to get things wrong. Put those two things together and we would frequently get recommendations that were wildly incorrect, but that's to be expected when you get garbage input being fed into algorithms written by people who aren't domain experts.

Deinumite 9y ago
This basically sums up my brief stint in healthcare. Every hospital / doctor wants to talk about the wealth of medical information they are sitting on... as you said most notes are just transcribed ad lib, or input into rigid EMR systems, there is no middle ground. Also the language spoken by healthcare software is HL7 which is another nightmare in itself.
- throwaway7645 9y ago
  Please tell me of this HL7.

pgodzin 9y ago

The marketing has made it very hard to have a real conversation about IBM Watson. There is no such singular thing as "Watson". IBM offers a ML solution for health, for NLP, chatbots, etc. They all have very different capabilities and require different levels of machine learning. The marketing is BS, but most of the tech is real - if you give IBM your data, let them train a model on it, and communicate what you want, you will get an end-to-end custom solution. It's just not the magic IBM sells in its marketing videos. Disclaimer: SWE at Watson Health

shostack 9y ago
How do they market it to a tech audience who presumably see through this sort of thing due to a technical understanding of the subject matter?
- pgodzin 9y ago
  For me, Watson Health is actually working on a lot of interesting work in the healthcare space that will eventually lead to improvement in care and outcomes. And hospitals are exactly the kind of clients that IBM handles well - complicated data requirements, government regulations, etc. It's a very difficult, and often frustrating, space to get into.
- saghm 9y ago
  From other responses in this thread, it sounds like they don't, but instead sell it to the executives who make purchasing decisions.
peterburkimsher 9y ago
"if you give IBM your data, let them train a model on it, and communicate what you want, you will get an end-to-end custom solution" If you give a summer intern your data and communicate what you want, they can also give you a custom solution at a fraction of the price. IBM's model might be more advanced, but the real challenge is applying the conclusions, rather than just building a model. Communicating what you want is the hardest part. Most managers who are excited about AI (including my boss) have no idea what they want to use it for. "Making things more efficient" or "analysing what's going on in the factory" is way too vague. Getting data is not so hard, but getting good metadata is a challenge. For example, downloading some music in Chinese and tagging the artist/play count/lyrics/etc. When I have all that metadata, I might not need the machine learning part - I can just find the top 1000 songs and process them manually in an afternoon. Before spending millions on Watson, I think companies would have a higher return on investment by hiring a summer intern to come up with ideas for further research, and gather the data. Then they can apply AI if they really need it.

atsaloli 9y ago

This reminds me of a Linux Journal piece I did 5 years ago on system administration of the Watson supercomputer (after they got their 15 minutes of fame on Jeopardy): http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/system-administration-ibm-watson-supercomputer?page=0,1 http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/system-administration-ib... They brought in a sysadmin after they got up to 800 OS instances. Before that, it was just 3 part-time researchers handling the system administration duties.

dmritard96 9y ago

somewhat off topic but I find their use of 'Watson' to be rather outrageous as he was a big part of IBMs Jew tracking systems installed in concentration camps during world war two. I suppose I already looked at IBM as an org that really does not own this as they should but its particularly bothersome that they would use his name as a flagship of their marketing efforts.

ballenf 9y ago
I had always assumed that Watson was a reference to Sherlock Holmes' assistant. "Elementary my dear Watson" and such. Googled "ww2 watson" to find the wiki with the info you reference. Does IBM make clear which Watson the name's a reference to? I have to think you're right, but the Sherlock Holmes reference makes so much more sense to me in the sense of being the assistant while also stroking the customer's ego as the brilliant detective who hired Watson.

zhanwei 9y ago

So IBM Watson can do all the smart and complex stuff but we still need human to do the dumb stuff like importing excel files where the cost outweighs the benefit of getting Watson to do the smart stuff.

endswapper 9y ago

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonbloomberg/2017/07/02/is-ibm-watson-a-joke/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonbloomberg/2017/07/02/is-ib...

sumoboy 9y ago

IBM should ask Watson how to fix the company first, then it would have some credibility. They don't treat there employees very well either, but neither does Oracle so why would anybody waste time working for losers. +1 "dog shit wrapped in cat shit" .. that is awesome.

code4tee 9y ago

Within the data science community Watson has long been viewed as snake oil. Glad to see less technical and business folks are finally smelling BS too.

shard972 9y ago

Only took like 4 years for someone to catch on. I remember seeing right away when they put Watson on jeopardy it was going to be a giant pr stunt.

mark_l_watson 9y ago

In the last 6 weeks, I have been called by two reporters (Wall Street Journal and Reuters) for background on AI. I talked with the Journal reporter for about an hour, covering 'everything.' However, the Reuters reporter only wanted to talk about IBM Watson - we just had a short talk. I have seen a lot of negative press on Watson, but really, it can be evaluated like any other API to see if it meets your needs.

isubkhankulov 9y ago
the submarine - paul graham
- mark_l_watson 9y ago
  Thanks, interesting read!

daxfohl 9y ago

> and let’s be real, things would look much worse if Google, Microsoft and Facebook were added to this table Umm, so add them? And Nvidia, Intel, Baidu, Uber, Tesla? Anybody else? That single chart would actually be more interesting than the entirety of this article.

RobLach 9y ago
The techcrunch article says that but the Jefferies analyis mentions them in the notes for those charts saying they're compareable to Amazon.

bradneuberg 9y ago

I've had two encounters with IBM Watson that left me unimpressed. The first was using the IBM Watson Speech Transcription service (give an audio file and get text); the results were pretty bad vs. Google's, for example. The second was in their recent integration into Star Trek Bridge Command (which is an amazing game BTW!); the speech recognition results were pretty bad.

rv816 9y ago

Finally someone publishes what everybody in the industry has long since known, especially in healthcare.

BucketSort 9y ago

As soon as I saw "now with Watson" on H&R block's windows, I knew it was over.

throwaway91111 9y ago

This is only the beginning of selling AI as a panacea. People, if it does something useful, there is a term for it. The only reason not to use that term is to AVOID direct comparisons.

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polm23 9y ago

Best story I heard from a guy who claimed to have worked at IBM in a bar was when he went to meet a client and they asked, in all seriousness, where the talking hologram from the commercial was.

zitterbewegung 9y ago

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.

bischofs 9y ago

What does IBM even do anymore? Is it some bizarre set of buildings where they just play with computers and print money? What product do they sell? Whom do they sell it to? I am genuinely curious... I have a comp sci degree and worked in different industries relating to software and have never even seen or touched any IBM tech except for those old cash registers.

lucaspiller 9y ago
I was working for a UN organisation last year and some of my work overlapped with another project that was being done by IBM. They were hired to make our web applications more secure by adding 2FA and user access control middleware, using their Websphere family of products (IIRC) and building custom integrations. I didn't get involved much on the project, but from what I understand the developers sent to work with us were useless, the products were bad or at least poorly suited for us, and what they were going to build was a huge waste of money. (However the last point was more to do with deep organisational issues where I was working). The main product IBM sold was 'mininising risk' which the director of our department loved - as it meant if the project failed he would have someone to take the blame other than himself. The old saying 'nobody got fired for choosing IBM' is still true.
adrianN 9y ago
You need to work in crusty old companies that only recently got into doing software. Anything that produces hardware would be a good start.

verdverm 9y ago

I quit IBM Watson 5 weeks ago. Here is why IBM is suffering. https://verdverm.com/2017/07/a-new-chapter/ https://verdverm.com/2017/07/a-new-chapter/ PM me for more ;]

keithpeter 9y ago
Not my circus and not my monkeys, but how long did you work for IBM? Your blog post is short on actual dates (a time frame) Best of luck

komali2 9y ago

I think it's one of the last great investments - Watson will make IBM an astonishing amount of money, right up until it and the technology its spearheading make money irrelevant.

JunkDNA 9y ago

Still waiting for the peer reviewed publication in a prestigious medical journal that demonstrates doctors using Watson get better outcomes for their patients.

bitmapbrother 9y ago

This is simply the media and analysts catching up with what everyone familiar with Watson already knew - that it was nothing more than marketing bullshit designed to project IBM as a leader in A.I. Watson is a lot like IBM's cloud initiative - a service so bad that they don't even use it internally, but have no problems conning their customers on its value.

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dangero 9y ago

Anything that IBM puts out remember they are a consulting company, so they want to generate a huge brand name. That allows them to charge the consulting prices they need to charge to make this business work for them. IBM Watson is a collection of sort-of-working AI related APIs, but it gets A LOT of press. If they can create an AI brain, then people will believe they can do anything for them in the tech arena and that's the goal.

heisenbit 9y ago
This is true. However they are also accounting towards AI services. The way it works is that at the beginning a few existing projects are re-classified under the new heading. But over time the revenue is expected to grow. It did not. And other revenue is also not growing - that was why they started this new initiative in the first place. Unless one switches in time to a new growth story in a credible manner one has to make it work at some point in time. Eventually even Wall St. gets a clue and then real problems start.

f4rker 9y ago

"and let’s be real" If this is how you write, quit your job as a writer.

hacksonx 9y ago

Fundamental software problems here. Probably the reason why software is being marketed as service more and more. IBM might be moving a little too fast, especially from a sales perspective but their systems offer features that will define the future.

tdb7893 9y ago
The problem is that their systems aren't very good so if it's just APIs then it's more than likely a cloud provider would provide similar APIs and eat their lunch. The only thing they seem to really be able to do in this space is consulting
- daniellerommel 9y ago
  Did you ever see the comparison between IBM Watson and WolframAlpha? http://gizmodo.com/5766124/the-difference-between-watson-and-wolframalpha http://gizmodo.com/5766124/the-difference-between-watson-and... Worth checking out

fredsanford 9y ago

IBMs solution? More offshore and H1B and force everyone into the office. Circling the drain.

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snissn 9y ago

I spent months as a fully qualified lead trying to buy a Watson product and simply couldn't. Had calls rescheduled, canceled, got on the phone and a kafka-esque experiences with a sales person. We gave up and just built out what we wanted to buy..

batmansmk 9y ago

IBM offered a day of Watson training in San Francisco about a year and a half ago. As engineers working with classifications, we were interested to compare the results of Watson to our algorithms, but also look at the API, the communication, the community etc. It was a classroom nightmare. WIFI not working, Bluemix required for all workshops not working at that time, teachers very new on the topic themselves (one confessed he only knew Watson for a couple of weeks before the training), no announcement, no nice moment to socialize or build up a community, no coupon given to try on our own after, ... And... the algorithms didn't work at all. The sentiment analysis was classifying as really positive the sentence: "I wasn't happy at all by the service" due to 'happy' and 'all' present in the sentence.

zaphod_ibm 9y ago

Disclosure: I work for IBM. Watson is not a consumer gadget but the AI platform for real business. Watson solutions are being built, used, and deployed in more than 45 countries and across 20 different industries. Take health care alone -- Watson is in clinical use in the US and 5 other countries, and it has been trained on 8 types of cancers, with plans to add 6 more this year. Watson has now been trained and released to help support physicians in their treatment of breast, lung, colorectal, cervical, ovarian, gastric and prostate cancers. By the end of the year, the technology will be available to support at least 12 cancer types, representing 80 percent of the global incidence of cancer. Beyond oncology, Watson is in use by nearly half of the top 25 life sciences companies, major manufacturers for IoT applications, retail and financial services firms, and partners like GM, H&R Block and SalesForce.com. We have invested billions of dollars in the Watson business unit since its inception in 2014, with more than 15,000 professionals, and more than a third of IBM's research division is devoted to leading-edge AI research. When you consider the vast scope of IBM's work in AI, from Watson Health to Watson Financial Services to the emerging Internet of Things opportunity, it is clear that no other company is doing AI at the scale of IBM. By the end of this year, Watson will touch one billion people in some way · Watson can “see,” able to describe the contents of an image. For example, Watson can identify melanoma from skin lesion images with 95 percent accuracy, according to research with Memorial Sloan Kettering. · Watson can “hear,” understanding speech including Japanese, Mandarin, Spanish, Portuguese, among others. · Watson can “read” 9 languages. · Watson can “feel” impulses from sensors in elevators, buildings, autos and even ball bearings. · At IBM, there are more than 1,000 researchers focused solely on artificial intelligence

Vijayasankarv 9y ago

I do work for IBM. Here is my personal take for what it is worth. https://andvijaysays.com/2017/07/17/ibm-watson-is-just-fine-thank-you/ https://andvijaysays.com/2017/07/17/ibm-watson-is-just-fine-...