To the average American, artificial intelligence is something mesmerizing, something to be applauded. And IBM is supposedly on the forefront of the field.
But Chamath Palihapitiya, CEO and founder of Social Capital, a Palo Alto, California-based venture capital firm, begs to differ.
Behavioral Health, Interoperability and eConsent: Meeting the Demands of CMS Final Rule Compliance
In a webinar on April 16 at 1pm ET, Aneesh Chopra will moderate a discussion with executives from DocuSign, Velatura, and behavioral health providers on eConsent, health information exchange and compliance with the CMS Final Rule on interoperability.
“Watson is a joke, just to be completely honest,” he said in an interview on CNBC’s “Closing Bell” last week.
Instead, he pointed to Google and Amazon as companies he would take seriously in the space, claiming they’re “head and shoulders ahead of every single other company.”
“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,” Palihapitiya added.
The dig at the name is factually erroneous, however.
A Deep-dive Into Specialty Pharma
A specialty drug is a class of prescription medications used to treat complex, chronic or rare medical conditions. Although this classification was originally intended to define the treatment of rare, also termed “orphan” diseases, affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the US, more recently, specialty drugs have emerged as the cornerstone of treatment for chronic and complex diseases such as cancer, autoimmune conditions, diabetes, hepatitis C, and HIV/AIDS.
Watson’s namesake isn’t from the detective series penned by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. The cognitive computing platform was named after Thomas J. Watson, the founder of IBM, according to the company.
Other than the name, Palihapitiya finds more to criticize.
“What you do when you innovate in machine learning and artificial intelligence is you spend enormous amounts of time collecting enormous amounts of data,” Palihapitiya said, adding that he doesn’t seem to think IBM is doing that.
“I think what IBM is excellent at is using their sales and marketing infrastructure to convince people who have asymmetrically less knowledge to pay for something,” he said.
It’s interesting that the comment comes from Palihapitiya, given that his wife, Brigette Lau, previously worked as a client executive at IBM, according to her LinkedIn.
IBM responded to Palihapitiya in a statement, ending on a rather sassy note:
Watson is not a consumer gadget but the A.I. platform for real business. Watson is in clinical use in the U.S. and 5 other countries. It has been trained on 6 types of cancers with plans to add 8 more this year. 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. Does any serious person consider saving lives, enhancing customer service and driving business innovation a joke?
The statement put Palihapitiya on the backfoot the very next day.
“I probably should have been more careful with my words,” he told CNBC’s “Squawk Box.” “I probably shouldn’t have said it the way I said it.”
But he still managed to challenge IBM Watson.
“We’ve been building a company for seven years now that’s also doing something equally equivalently productive, and probably I would say better than IBM,” Palihapitiya declared. “I’d love to put us in a head-to-head to see how they do.”
According to CNBC, he was referencing Syapse, a Palo Alto, California-based precision medicine software company.
Photo: ANDRZEJ WOJCICKI, Getty Images
