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Comment by PaulHoule | Hacker News Reader

What's bad about it is that it leads to a "market for lemons" for anyone working in the A.I. field in either engineering or sales. People see so much bullshit that they come to the conclusion that it is all bullshit.

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I think this is good.

In a world that moves too quick to have review/ratings companies for everything, you should come in skeptical and be proven wrong.

Its up to the merchant to make a great product, its up to you to compare and make good decisions.

No, it's bad because it drives down the potential market value for good products that could become available in the market because the market expects that all AI is inferior to expectations.

Temporarily. Once past (and possibly during) the "Trough of Disillusionment"[1], products that really do solve problems that people are willing to pay to have solved will do very well.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hype_cycle

IBM can bullshit it's way through a coming "AI Winter"; startups might not be able to.

How do you "compare" multimillion dollar custom IT installations, before you buy?

By having people who aren't working for the vendor who know things about such installations assess them before they are bought.

Sure, but Watson isn’t really a product and IBM isn’t really a merchant here. There’s never going to be a Watson review anywhere because (AFAICT) Watson is just a marketing name for a wide range of technologies, none of which do any of the stuff shown in the TV commercials. That’s the problem.

I don’t even know who those ads are targeting. Anyone who knows anything at all about this stuff will be dismayed at the sheer BS of it all. Everyone else seeing the ads isn’t in a position to steer customers towards IBM for all their AI needs. They really need to kill the whole ad campaign, surely it’s doing IBM more harm than good.

Remember these ads?

https://youtu.be/x7ozaFbqg00

The "market for lemons" theory proved that used car dealerships can't exist. And yet they do. People understand that ads are just a hint and a tease, not a precise value proposition.

That isn't the conclusion of the market for lemons. It predicted that the price of used cars would be substantially depressed due to unknown quality, especially when the seller had little reputation. Considering the huge depreciation a new car experiences as soon as it is driven off the lot and that prices are lower when buying from individual sellers rather than used car dealerships, there is plenty of evidence that the theory was correct.

What I find interesting is that free Carfax reports are becoming pretty common, which seems like a mechanism to deal with the problem of a market with only lemons. But I was browsing cars online and started looking for "good" ones, defined as no accidents and regular oil changes at the dealer, and interestingly they were almost non-existent. So in fact, the proposition that cars for sale will be lemons seems to be true even though the compensatory mechanisms exist. It would appear maybe buyers don't utilize information to their advantage, which reminds me of a recent article about how investors don't seem to digest all the information in SEC filings, even though orthodox market theory assumes prices incorporate all public data.

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