Platform Wars (Part I): Google AI
Evaluating Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, & Microsoft in the age of AI
Several weeks ago, Jefferies’ analyst James Kisner published a scathing report, shedding light onto the shortcomings of IBM Watson. Kisner focused on the $60 million disastrous Watson project for MD Anderson, and highlighted how much IBM is lagging behind Amazon and Apple.
As John Mannes pointed out on TechCrunch, “things would look much worse if Google, Microsoft and Facebook were added to this table.” He also eloquently summarized the common pitfall in our approach to AI: “Reality is that AI isn’t an amorphous black hole that sucks in unstructured data to produce insights. A solid data pipeline and a domain-specific understanding of the AI business problem at hand is table minimum.”
How then should we evaluate different platforms in the age of AI? This is the key question I want to address as I review the Big Five (Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft) tech companies and their recent moves in AI offerings. Since Google is widely considered the frontrunner in the AI race, I will start with Google.
