13 ms·

I can’t read most of that article because it’s behind a paywall, but wow, is Watson just the largest attempt to sell vaporware of all time?? They had a super bo

I can’t read most of that article because it’s behind a paywall, but wow, is Watson just the largest attempt to sell vaporware of all time?? They had a super bowl ad! A few friends from university were hired into the Watson team as hardly technical PMs. I have never heard any of them describe what Watson is or does.

bunderbunder 8y ago
I'm not sure I'd call it vaporware. I've not used it myself, but the more objective reports I've seen indicate that Watson is very good at what it does. The problem seems more to be what it does - accurately interpreting and then answering queries written in natural language - isn't actually that useful. For example, for drug discovery: I'm guessing, off the cuff, that there are other drug discovery tools out there, and that, while they don't allow you to frame your searches in terms of natural language queries, that's probably not actually a problem in practice. Because the querying methods they've developed are presumably highly tuned to their real task, which is enabling a skilled and knowledgeable practitioner to specify what they're looking for with great precision. It's sort of like programming languages: The ones that are designed to be the closest to natural language (e.g., AppleScript) do have a gentle learning curve for absolute beginners, but they also turn out to be some of the very worst languages for trying to do any sort of serious work.
- sodosopa 8y ago
  Which is why data scientists use python instead of AppleScript.
sodosopa 8y ago
I’m running on prem instances of Watson and it’s far from vaporware but Watson has become more of a brand name. For the Watson product I use, It’s more of a wrapper to do AI and ML work, notebooks, containers and related tools for data science.
- elliekelly 8y ago
  Same here. And so far I have to say I'm quite happy with it. Is it the best tool for ML? Probably not. But it's certainly the easiest I've found so far and it works for what I'm using it for.
donkeyd 8y ago
I've commented this before, but Watson is nothing but branding for anything IBM does that is somewhat intelligent. There's pretty much no common technology between the different Watson products, so there's no 'core Watson' like many people believe. Some products with Watson branding are great and industry leading. Others suck. The latter tend to appear in headlines and severely impact the brand they established with Jeopardy and their ads.
- apohn 8y ago
  I suspect what happened was that Watson started out as a single product or focused suite of products. I'm just guessing, but then as the marketing induced hype started and growth/results were not on target , they realized there was a lot of interest in Watson so IBM pivoted and started rolling everything under the Watson brand - products, consulting, cloud stuff, etc. Basically that way they could say Watson was a "success" and internally/externally it would be opaque as to where exactly the profits and losses were. I say all this because I'm at a place now where this is happening. Hugh company with a supposedly game changing product that is mediocre (at best). Massive marketing campaign for "Product X" that is 100% buzzwords and 200% BS. After constant missed revenue targets and product disappointments internally and externally, company is clearly pivoting (but not saying so) to rolling everything under "Brand X."
  - nintendo95 8y ago
    I worked there (Watson Health) a few years back. All that happened is IBM. That's right. They bought us (a small start-up) and this is what they did in a year to us: 1. replaced managers with their own who didn't get anything, kind of old date executives taken away from mainframe 2. banned remote work (this costed them a few brilliant engineers) 3. opened one huge open space full of noise and chatter, I mean sales team next to the development team, etc (this cost them even more headcount among experienced developers) 4. For months we did nothing! There were whole teams doing nothing for months on an end. I wrote zero lines of code in over 6 month period. Why? Because management didn't know which direction should be taken... and they kept hiring too! They kept hiring new developers when the ones already at place had absolutely nothing to do! This is from my (simple developer) perspective. Not sure how it looked in sales, among executives, etc. But that was very weird environment. I had great Manager who asked me to learn react and take courses in react (mind you it was two years back!) As we "might want to do something in react in the future". So I basically spent my last six months there learning React, aka preparing to the job interviews... they even got us paid courses and all. I mean... IBM. And once they fired me (these were lay-offs, thousands affected, many of them just hired in past year, like myself) I was paid severance pay too. I went there worked a year, last 6 months was learning for job interviews... fantastic pay too. IBM is crazy.
gowld 8y ago
This is what IBM has always done. 20 years ago they pretended that their Deep Blue chess engine was in all their IT products. It's similar to how DeepMind AlphaGo is PR for Google's AI effort, but IBM takes it to comical extremes.
- wpasc 8y ago
  I agree with you that IBM is full of shit, Google too to a degree, but Google has used AI in a variety of their products even down to data center cooling processes. I don't think IBM and Google are comparable in this respect.
- ne0sapi3n 8y ago
  > 20 years ago they pretended that their Deep Blue chess engine was in all their IT products [citation needed] IBM did not do this, though funding the Deep Thought team from CMU was cheaper than a Super Bowl commercial and brought more durable effect.
notfromhere 8y ago
Watson is the branding term for an army of outsourced consultants (mostly in India) plugging away at the raw data. Watson is not very good, and largely doesn't exist outside of slick marketing campaigns.
dekhn 8y ago
there are large amounts of interesting things in watson but it was still overmarketed for what it can do.
VeninVidiaVicii 8y ago
That's really interesting. I work in the emergency room, and pretty much our entire approach up patient care is algorithm-driven. As soon as the patient checks in, their demographics (age, sex, etc) and vitals are fed into a mysterious program, which suggests an acuity level, and basically drives the whole course of treatment. The patient is required to be tested for a variety of disease processes based on the AI-generated differential diagnoses. Honestly, I thought/still think medicine is headed toward this, which is why I decided to go into research.
- darrin 8y ago
  What program is that? Is that something Epic/Cerner/whatever does, or some add-on?
  - VeninVidiaVicii 8y ago
    It's MedHost with a lot of modifications specific to our hospital.

bunderbunder 8y ago

I'm not sure I'd call it vaporware. I've not used it myself, but the more objective reports I've seen indicate that Watson is very good at what it does. The problem seems more to be what it does - accurately interpreting and then answering queries written in natural language - isn't actually that useful. For example, for drug discovery: I'm guessing, off the cuff, that there are other drug discovery tools out there, and that, while they don't allow you to frame your searches in terms of natural language queries, that's probably not actually a problem in practice. Because the querying methods they've developed are presumably highly tuned to their real task, which is enabling a skilled and knowledgeable practitioner to specify what they're looking for with great precision. It's sort of like programming languages: The ones that are designed to be the closest to natural language (e.g., AppleScript) do have a gentle learning curve for absolute beginners, but they also turn out to be some of the very worst languages for trying to do any sort of serious work.

sodosopa 8y ago
Which is why data scientists use python instead of AppleScript.

sodosopa 8y ago

I’m running on prem instances of Watson and it’s far from vaporware but Watson has become more of a brand name. For the Watson product I use, It’s more of a wrapper to do AI and ML work, notebooks, containers and related tools for data science.

elliekelly 8y ago
Same here. And so far I have to say I'm quite happy with it. Is it the best tool for ML? Probably not. But it's certainly the easiest I've found so far and it works for what I'm using it for.

donkeyd 8y ago

I've commented this before, but Watson is nothing but branding for anything IBM does that is somewhat intelligent. There's pretty much no common technology between the different Watson products, so there's no 'core Watson' like many people believe. Some products with Watson branding are great and industry leading. Others suck. The latter tend to appear in headlines and severely impact the brand they established with Jeopardy and their ads.

apohn 8y ago
I suspect what happened was that Watson started out as a single product or focused suite of products. I'm just guessing, but then as the marketing induced hype started and growth/results were not on target , they realized there was a lot of interest in Watson so IBM pivoted and started rolling everything under the Watson brand - products, consulting, cloud stuff, etc. Basically that way they could say Watson was a "success" and internally/externally it would be opaque as to where exactly the profits and losses were. I say all this because I'm at a place now where this is happening. Hugh company with a supposedly game changing product that is mediocre (at best). Massive marketing campaign for "Product X" that is 100% buzzwords and 200% BS. After constant missed revenue targets and product disappointments internally and externally, company is clearly pivoting (but not saying so) to rolling everything under "Brand X."
- nintendo95 8y ago
  I worked there (Watson Health) a few years back. All that happened is IBM. That's right. They bought us (a small start-up) and this is what they did in a year to us: 1. replaced managers with their own who didn't get anything, kind of old date executives taken away from mainframe 2. banned remote work (this costed them a few brilliant engineers) 3. opened one huge open space full of noise and chatter, I mean sales team next to the development team, etc (this cost them even more headcount among experienced developers) 4. For months we did nothing! There were whole teams doing nothing for months on an end. I wrote zero lines of code in over 6 month period. Why? Because management didn't know which direction should be taken... and they kept hiring too! They kept hiring new developers when the ones already at place had absolutely nothing to do! This is from my (simple developer) perspective. Not sure how it looked in sales, among executives, etc. But that was very weird environment. I had great Manager who asked me to learn react and take courses in react (mind you it was two years back!) As we "might want to do something in react in the future". So I basically spent my last six months there learning React, aka preparing to the job interviews... they even got us paid courses and all. I mean... IBM. And once they fired me (these were lay-offs, thousands affected, many of them just hired in past year, like myself) I was paid severance pay too. I went there worked a year, last 6 months was learning for job interviews... fantastic pay too. IBM is crazy.

gowld 8y ago

This is what IBM has always done. 20 years ago they pretended that their Deep Blue chess engine was in all their IT products. It's similar to how DeepMind AlphaGo is PR for Google's AI effort, but IBM takes it to comical extremes.

wpasc 8y ago
I agree with you that IBM is full of shit, Google too to a degree, but Google has used AI in a variety of their products even down to data center cooling processes. I don't think IBM and Google are comparable in this respect.
ne0sapi3n 8y ago
> 20 years ago they pretended that their Deep Blue chess engine was in all their IT products [citation needed] IBM did not do this, though funding the Deep Thought team from CMU was cheaper than a Super Bowl commercial and brought more durable effect.

notfromhere 8y ago

Watson is the branding term for an army of outsourced consultants (mostly in India) plugging away at the raw data. Watson is not very good, and largely doesn't exist outside of slick marketing campaigns.

dekhn 8y ago

there are large amounts of interesting things in watson but it was still overmarketed for what it can do.

VeninVidiaVicii 8y ago

That's really interesting. I work in the emergency room, and pretty much our entire approach up patient care is algorithm-driven. As soon as the patient checks in, their demographics (age, sex, etc) and vitals are fed into a mysterious program, which suggests an acuity level, and basically drives the whole course of treatment. The patient is required to be tested for a variety of disease processes based on the AI-generated differential diagnoses. Honestly, I thought/still think medicine is headed toward this, which is why I decided to go into research.

darrin 8y ago
What program is that? Is that something Epic/Cerner/whatever does, or some add-on?
- VeninVidiaVicii 8y ago
  It's MedHost with a lot of modifications specific to our hospital.