IBM's Watson 'is a Joke,' Says Social Capital CEO Palihapitiya | Hacker News Reader

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

cnbc.com

13 pointslmg6437 comments

> "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?

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...

Ben Goertzel has said (from the beginning) that Watson is just another narrow AI system.

I know deep AI is the new hotness, but we still don't know whether it will work. Personally, I think expert systems died too soon, and we're going to see a resurgence.

I wouldn't be surprised if expert systems + operant conditioning don't end up being better at general intelligence than all of the fancier machine learning. That's a very old fashioned view, but I'm an old fashioned guy. My point is just that we don't know.

Deep learning has already "worked" on many tasked and has also pushed the state of the art in a large range of fields. It's not going to solve every problem but I don't really understand what you mean by not being sure whether it "works".

When I say "work" I mean "lead to human-grade general intelligence".

Of course for niche intelligence AI has been working forever.

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

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