Oblique references to IBM and their product Watson. I assume they're afraid IBM would otherwise find their comment and sue them for libel (implausible).
For those that need further explanation, HAL is the killer computer in the movie 2001, the name was picked for the movie because the letters are shifted by one from "IBM." IBM's product Watson is named after Sherlock Holmes's sidekick, Dr. Watson.
Edit: the product was named after a prominent, early CEO of IBM, not the character; Sherlock Holmes & Dr. Watson is what the commenter was referencing (I've thought the Watson name was a Holmes reference since it won Jeopardy).
the $100k thing is referring to the costs of deep learning, in my case these costs torpedoed an otherwise good looking business case. Other things that academics do is to report "human level" results when they mean "10 people I recruited on AWS mechanical turk, who really didn't give a monkeys about what they were doing". For academic papers indicating that technology might be valuable in the real world it's clear that they should be read as "this technology might be valuable after 5 years of development". The problem is that this tech then gets hyped by thirdparties which then obscure the 5 years of work required - sometimes meaning that the 5 years doesn't get done...
HAL is just IBM encypted using Caesar cipher / ROT25 :)
Holmes must be Watson (but "Holmes" is also the marketing name given by another tech vendor in this space to their own AI product inspired by Watson - very creative)
For those that need further explanation, HAL is the killer computer in the movie 2001, the name was picked for the movie because the letters are shifted by one from "IBM." IBM's product Watson is named after Sherlock Holmes's sidekick, Dr. Watson.
Edit: the product was named after a prominent, early CEO of IBM, not the character; Sherlock Holmes & Dr. Watson is what the commenter was referencing (I've thought the Watson name was a Holmes reference since it won Jeopardy).