I see 99 ways this approach would fail, except one case, it could work if my product is able to hit product market fit. PMF is why most startups fail, not because they couldn't figure out how to sell... Even we assume Saas, FinTech, Dev tools, Uber for dogs are in the same bucket of sales variety, then applied this battleship approach, you'd be dead in the water before you realize your product isn't solving a problem you can charge money for yet most people you ask would tell you if you added certain features it could be useful, or if you tried this other segment of customers you could make it.
Plus "buy my book to learn more" didn't work for me. I'm a founder. Just saying.
I agree with you however, small set of training data could be made available with a downloadable Watson jr software so that you can see it playing chess against you, also proving somehow it's not just a clever algorithm and it's ML. I'm simplifying to make my point.
I can't even assume we all agree winning against Kasparov is proof enough. Just for argument's sake, you can buy him out, convince him that this is an amazing PR for him as well - lose one game, be double famous for life, just as you can convince a boxer to lose a match. None of this tells me 100% that Watson is AI capable of winning a chess game in the 90s or hold an intellectual debate in 2018.
Again, I'm not saying it didn't happen, I'm saying burden of proof is bothering me.
A good friend of mine who is a VP Cloud at IBM said when I asked last year "no one can explain Watson at ibm - it's a black box" I also wrote a few apps with tensorflow.
Kasparov, winning Go game, playing fortnite, sure.What they are suggesting here and with Sophie, without proof of any kind, is beyond me.
How can we rule out the possibility that Watson, Sophia etc are some WiFi operated, human controlled PR stunts?
I'm not saying they are, but even when it did beat Kasparov, where was the proof, code we can run ourselves and see, witnesses, just basic accountability stuff that we can make us safely believe that these are not staged?
Plus "buy my book to learn more" didn't work for me. I'm a founder. Just saying.