On the May 8th edition of Closing Bell on CNBC, venture capitalist Chamath Palihapitiya, founder and CEO of Social Capital, created quite a stir in enterprise artificial intelligence (AI) circles, when he took on Watson, Big Blue's AI platform. "Human intelligence outperforms machine-learning applications in complex decision making routinely required during the course of care, because machines do not yet possess mature capabilities for perceiving, reasoning, or explaining," explained Ernest Sohn, a chief data scientist in Booz Allen's Data Solutions and Machine Intelligence group; Joachim Roski, a principal at Booz Allen Hamilton; Steven Escaravage, vice president in Booz Allen's Strategic Innovation Group; and Kevin Maloy, MD, assistant professor of emergency medicine at Georgetown University School of Medicine. "A health care organization that relies on a single EHR [Electronic Health Record] vendor's analytic solutions, as well as its own legacy analytics infrastructure created before the era of big data, may see limited progress," they continued. "While many machine-learning solutions are not yet mature and sophisticated enough to support complex clinical decisions, machine learning can be effectively deployed today to reduce more routine, time-consuming, and resource-intensive tasks, allowing freed-up personnel to be redeployed to support higher-end work."

"Watson is a joke, just to be completely honest," he said in an interview with "Closing Bell" on the sidelines of the Sohn Investment Conference in New York. Watson is named after IBM's first CEO, Thomas J. Watson. He recommended Tesla's convertible bonds at the 22nd annual Sohn Conference, pointing out that it was effectively like buying the equity but with the downside protection of a bond. At last year's Sohn Conference, Palihapitiya recommended Amazon, whose stock is up 40 percent in the past year.