from Hacker News

IBM's Watson 'is a Joke,' Says Social Capital CEO Palihapitiya

by lmg643 on 5/8/17, 11:48 PM with 7 comments

  • by DKnoll on 5/9/17, 12:20 AM

    > "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?

  • by filereaper on 5/9/17, 3:41 AM

    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...

  • by theviat on 5/9/17, 12:16 PM

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