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Les marchands de sable

Slightly over a year back, we were contacted by IBM to try out Watson under some program for startups.

Starting out, they asked us to give them a try. We gave them a NLP related task and they were confident they would be able to do a good job of it.

After multiple meetings over the next 2 months, they barely produced any useful output. In the meantime, an intern with us got a pretty decent solution using just Python.

Our management did get invited to lunches and meetings for selling them some more products. During one of such invitations, since our CEO couldn't make it, I was sent.

I was surprised by how shoddy their presentation was given that I thought they might not be doing a good job on the problem we gave them but they should be slick on the selling side. Their presentation seemed like it was out of 2005 or something.