5 ms·

You will indeed be able to do Jeopardy too, and hopefully much more (we found that answering factoid questions isn't the most critical function so we haven't pr

by pesenti 10y ago

You will indeed be able to do Jeopardy too, and hopefully much more (we found that answering factoid questions isn't the most critical function so we haven't prioritized it, but it's coming). Many of the services that are on the platform can do things that were inconceivable just 5 years ago (like having a general visual classifier handle earth imagery with high enough accuracy to be useful http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/ibm-watson-california-water_us_573f2e9ae4b045cc9a70c0f1 http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/ibm-watson-california-wa...). Yes, there are alternatives - which is the sign of a healthy market - but we keep improving ours to stay state-of-the-art and to introduce higher level functions.

tezka 10y ago
Produce independently reviewed citation that you are state of the art, or even close to it, in any of these functionality.
- pesenti 10y ago
  Sure here are two (you may have to follow some links to go to the actual publications): Speech to text: https://developer.ibm.com/watson/blog/2016/04/28/recent-advances-in-conversational-speech-recognition-2/ https://developer.ibm.com/watson/blog/2016/04/28/recent-adva... Emotion: https://developer.ibm.com/watson/blog/2016/02/29/another-step-closer-to-building-empathetic-systems/ https://developer.ibm.com/watson/blog/2016/02/29/another-ste...
  - dr_zoidberg 10y ago
    In my experience, Speech to text has been a huge disapointment. I do give you that in the country where I live (Argentina) we speak a different... "dialect" of Spanish that what you've probably used to train your engine. Even then, it's entirely useless for my country, whereas Google has zero problems.
    - pesenti 10y ago
      Very fair point. Our STT service, even though it is based on a technology with the very best results for public benchmarks, is not as robust to accents at the moment - for the exact reason you mention, we didn't train it on all the dialects. But that will come with usage in the field. Google has a head start on this but with the usage of our services growing quickly we will be able to catch up quickly.
smitherfield 10y ago
>we found that answering factoid questions isn't the most critical function so we haven't prioritized it, but it's coming This should be priority number one. As others ITT have been saying, your marketing and PR departments have been writing checks that the product can't cash. When people see that Watson can't do what it does on TV, you lose a sale, and that potential customer is now going to be skeptical of IBM's future marketing claims. It doesn't matter if "answering factoid questions" doesn't have much real-world value — it's first of all what you're marketing the product as, so it should have been done and omigod amazing yesterday, and second of all the reason why your very smart marketing and PR people are pushing that angle is because it's a demonstration that is immediately and intuitively impressive to technical and non-technical people alike. Getting a computer to "answer factoid questions" viscerally screams "major breakthrough!" in a way that "general visual classification of earth imagery" simply doesn't. It wows people at the sales meeting instead of boring them. IBM needs to make sales. You need to build up a userbase toot sweet before Google et al start moving into this sector in a major way, as indeed they already are. There's a limited pool of enterprise customers, they don't change vendors often, and you need to get as many as you can as fast as you can, before Google/Amazon/whoever does, or you're done.
- amelius 10y ago
  I'm beginning to believe that answering factoid questions is still too expensive, from a computational point of view, to put in an API.
  - TheOtherHobbes 10y ago
    I'm beginning to believe IBM is a sinking battleship. Considering the job losses and the - insane - direction set by the board, it's not obvious IBM will still be around five years from now. Besides, a really good AI should literally be able to sell itself, surely?
    - rrrx3 10y ago
      Let's not make any grandstand statements - IBM may or may not be a sinking battleship (I'm inclined to think they are), but not being around in 5 years is a pretty specious prediction. They'll still be around, and still be peddling malformed solutions. They may be significantly different in leadership, presentation, and execution, but they'll still be around.
Bartweiss 10y ago
That's all great to hear, and I don't mean to belittle the very real achievements behind Watson, but it seems to miss the core complaint here: Watson can't do any of what the advertising shows. This isn't a matter of PR overhyping things a bit. Watson has (impressive) capabilities, and IBM's ads show Watson doing things, but the two circles essentially don't overlap. IBM is directly marketing Watson to the general public with promises that are entirely unsupported by the actual product. That's not just questionable business advertising, that's a level of inaccuracy that undermines AI work and understanding across the entire field.
- YeGoblynQueenne 10y ago
  >> Watson can't do any of what the advertising shows. Google, Facebook and MS also can't (try using Google translate in any other language combination than English and some other Romance or Germanic language). Why is that a problem for IBM specifically, or why will IBM's overpromising bring about the next AI winder, like Schank says?
  - Bartweiss 10y ago
    I'm not sure I've been seeing the same ads you have. Granted, Facebook Graph Search was horribly oversold, and Cortana is in the same "smart enough to be stupid" bucket as Siri and Alexa and every other vaguely-feminine chatbot on the market. Google Translate is incredibly fragile, and will get me from English to French but not from French to Arabic, or even from French to Quebecois. But all of that is roughly consistent with their advertising. Obscenely selective demos have a long history in software, and it seems standard (though not good) to assume that you're seeing the best-case uses of whatever product is being advertised. Car ads don't work any differently. Watson's advertising seems to take things to a whole different level. There's that Bob Dylan ad. They've got a North Face ad where Watson recommends an appropriate jacket for the Pacific Northwest in early spring. And so on. The commercial product Watson can't do those things. They aren't just showing off fragile best-case features, they're making stuff up, or hardcoding specific answers, or offering the North Face a different Watson than what you can get on their developer site. That bothers me. It bothers me when Google claims Translate can live-interpret foreign street signs, too, but even that's a less wild claim than IBM is making. Promising people a product you simply haven't made isn't kosher, and that's especially true when you're selling AI kool-aid, which is a field that's already ripe with hysterical (and baseless) warnings and promises.

by pesenti 10y ago

tezka 10y ago

Produce independently reviewed citation that you are state of the art, or even close to it, in any of these functionality.

pesenti 10y ago
Sure here are two (you may have to follow some links to go to the actual publications): Speech to text: https://developer.ibm.com/watson/blog/2016/04/28/recent-advances-in-conversational-speech-recognition-2/ https://developer.ibm.com/watson/blog/2016/04/28/recent-adva... Emotion: https://developer.ibm.com/watson/blog/2016/02/29/another-step-closer-to-building-empathetic-systems/ https://developer.ibm.com/watson/blog/2016/02/29/another-ste...
- dr_zoidberg 10y ago
  In my experience, Speech to text has been a huge disapointment. I do give you that in the country where I live (Argentina) we speak a different... "dialect" of Spanish that what you've probably used to train your engine. Even then, it's entirely useless for my country, whereas Google has zero problems.
  - pesenti 10y ago
    Very fair point. Our STT service, even though it is based on a technology with the very best results for public benchmarks, is not as robust to accents at the moment - for the exact reason you mention, we didn't train it on all the dialects. But that will come with usage in the field. Google has a head start on this but with the usage of our services growing quickly we will be able to catch up quickly.

smitherfield 10y ago

>we found that answering factoid questions isn't the most critical function so we haven't prioritized it, but it's coming This should be priority number one. As others ITT have been saying, your marketing and PR departments have been writing checks that the product can't cash. When people see that Watson can't do what it does on TV, you lose a sale, and that potential customer is now going to be skeptical of IBM's future marketing claims. It doesn't matter if "answering factoid questions" doesn't have much real-world value — it's first of all what you're marketing the product as, so it should have been done and omigod amazing yesterday, and second of all the reason why your very smart marketing and PR people are pushing that angle is because it's a demonstration that is immediately and intuitively impressive to technical and non-technical people alike. Getting a computer to "answer factoid questions" viscerally screams "major breakthrough!" in a way that "general visual classification of earth imagery" simply doesn't. It wows people at the sales meeting instead of boring them. IBM needs to make sales. You need to build up a userbase toot sweet before Google et al start moving into this sector in a major way, as indeed they already are. There's a limited pool of enterprise customers, they don't change vendors often, and you need to get as many as you can as fast as you can, before Google/Amazon/whoever does, or you're done.

amelius 10y ago
I'm beginning to believe that answering factoid questions is still too expensive, from a computational point of view, to put in an API.
- TheOtherHobbes 10y ago
  I'm beginning to believe IBM is a sinking battleship. Considering the job losses and the - insane - direction set by the board, it's not obvious IBM will still be around five years from now. Besides, a really good AI should literally be able to sell itself, surely?
  - rrrx3 10y ago
    Let's not make any grandstand statements - IBM may or may not be a sinking battleship (I'm inclined to think they are), but not being around in 5 years is a pretty specious prediction. They'll still be around, and still be peddling malformed solutions. They may be significantly different in leadership, presentation, and execution, but they'll still be around.

Bartweiss 10y ago

That's all great to hear, and I don't mean to belittle the very real achievements behind Watson, but it seems to miss the core complaint here: Watson can't do any of what the advertising shows. This isn't a matter of PR overhyping things a bit. Watson has (impressive) capabilities, and IBM's ads show Watson doing things, but the two circles essentially don't overlap. IBM is directly marketing Watson to the general public with promises that are entirely unsupported by the actual product. That's not just questionable business advertising, that's a level of inaccuracy that undermines AI work and understanding across the entire field.

YeGoblynQueenne 10y ago
>> Watson can't do any of what the advertising shows. Google, Facebook and MS also can't (try using Google translate in any other language combination than English and some other Romance or Germanic language). Why is that a problem for IBM specifically, or why will IBM's overpromising bring about the next AI winder, like Schank says?
- Bartweiss 10y ago
  I'm not sure I've been seeing the same ads you have. Granted, Facebook Graph Search was horribly oversold, and Cortana is in the same "smart enough to be stupid" bucket as Siri and Alexa and every other vaguely-feminine chatbot on the market. Google Translate is incredibly fragile, and will get me from English to French but not from French to Arabic, or even from French to Quebecois. But all of that is roughly consistent with their advertising. Obscenely selective demos have a long history in software, and it seems standard (though not good) to assume that you're seeing the best-case uses of whatever product is being advertised. Car ads don't work any differently. Watson's advertising seems to take things to a whole different level. There's that Bob Dylan ad. They've got a North Face ad where Watson recommends an appropriate jacket for the Pacific Northwest in early spring. And so on. The commercial product Watson can't do those things. They aren't just showing off fragile best-case features, they're making stuff up, or hardcoding specific answers, or offering the North Face a different Watson than what you can get on their developer site. That bothers me. It bothers me when Google claims Translate can live-interpret foreign street signs, too, but even that's a less wild claim than IBM is making. Promising people a product you simply haven't made isn't kosher, and that's especially true when you're selling AI kool-aid, which is a field that's already ripe with hysterical (and baseless) warnings and promises.