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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 a

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.
  - pixelbash 10y ago
    Have used the google translate app with a camera to translate Japanese menus, museum cards, etc. It wasn't perfect, but considering there are three separate 'alphabets' for it to handle it was pretty amazing.
  - YeGoblynQueenne 10y ago
    >> Promising people a product you simply haven't made isn't kosher Agreed- but I'm saying that that's exactly what I get from ads of the products you mention, Siri, Alexa et al. Case in point: that real-time Skype translation ad that made the rounds a while ago. In any case, I don't pay that much attention to what is advertised. But I do pay attention to two things: on the one hand, (scientific) papers published by the various teams and on the other hand, the announcements those teams make in the technology press. I've read most of the Watson papers and quite a few of the NLP stuff from Google and followed the assorted tech press announcements. I have to say that my impression is that Google is brazenly overhyping their stuff, they constantly try to fudge things as much as they can. Their dependency parser beats previous efforts on the Brown corpus? It's the best natural language parser ever! Their image recognition beats imagenet? It's showing superhuman ability! And so on. IBM's advertisement is relatively tame in comparison. All the other major players in this are equally unscrupulous and there's no point in singling anyone out.
    - Bartweiss 10y ago
      This is an interesting take - I hadn't really considered it, but on reflections Google's more academic claims are hyped up in a way that IBM doesn't seem especially guilty of. Some of their image recognition breakthroughs have been truly remarkable, but I agree the claims are a bit out of line. I think I was probably put on edge by the Watson ads not just because of their scope (the Skype thing is similarly inaccurate) but because they conform to a very specific pattern of AI over-promising that I've grown to hate. To a lot of nontechnical (or even just non-CS) people, strong AI is synonymous with Samantha from Her. We've been seeing people mistake existing tech for that since the 60s, when people were taking ELIZA seriously. Cue Cleverbot, Siri, and most obnoxiously Eugene Goostman (you don't get to claim you passed the Turing Test by convincing 30% of English speaking observers that you're a Ukranian child!) So I look at the Watson ads and see exactly this pattern at work, but worse than ever. Most people know by now that Siri and Alexa are just voice assistants, and as good as the ads look no one is really claiming otherwise. The Watson ads, by contrast, throw around "cognitive computing" to imply real understanding, and then air scripted exchanges that are simply false, rather than selective. Worse, they're doing mass-market ads for a developer-only product, so viewers won't even try it out and see that it doesn't do what's being shown. It may not be the worst on an overall-inaccuracy level, but I get twitchy when I hear people respond to discussions of strong AI with "Oh, basically what that Watson thing does?" And I do hear that, somewhat regularly. Crappy product hype is annoying, but I really wish we could stop telling people we've built real intelligence when we haven't.

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.
- pixelbash 10y ago
  Have used the google translate app with a camera to translate Japanese menus, museum cards, etc. It wasn't perfect, but considering there are three separate 'alphabets' for it to handle it was pretty amazing.
- YeGoblynQueenne 10y ago
  >> Promising people a product you simply haven't made isn't kosher Agreed- but I'm saying that that's exactly what I get from ads of the products you mention, Siri, Alexa et al. Case in point: that real-time Skype translation ad that made the rounds a while ago. In any case, I don't pay that much attention to what is advertised. But I do pay attention to two things: on the one hand, (scientific) papers published by the various teams and on the other hand, the announcements those teams make in the technology press. I've read most of the Watson papers and quite a few of the NLP stuff from Google and followed the assorted tech press announcements. I have to say that my impression is that Google is brazenly overhyping their stuff, they constantly try to fudge things as much as they can. Their dependency parser beats previous efforts on the Brown corpus? It's the best natural language parser ever! Their image recognition beats imagenet? It's showing superhuman ability! And so on. IBM's advertisement is relatively tame in comparison. All the other major players in this are equally unscrupulous and there's no point in singling anyone out.
  - Bartweiss 10y ago
    This is an interesting take - I hadn't really considered it, but on reflections Google's more academic claims are hyped up in a way that IBM doesn't seem especially guilty of. Some of their image recognition breakthroughs have been truly remarkable, but I agree the claims are a bit out of line. I think I was probably put on edge by the Watson ads not just because of their scope (the Skype thing is similarly inaccurate) but because they conform to a very specific pattern of AI over-promising that I've grown to hate. To a lot of nontechnical (or even just non-CS) people, strong AI is synonymous with Samantha from Her. We've been seeing people mistake existing tech for that since the 60s, when people were taking ELIZA seriously. Cue Cleverbot, Siri, and most obnoxiously Eugene Goostman (you don't get to claim you passed the Turing Test by convincing 30% of English speaking observers that you're a Ukranian child!) So I look at the Watson ads and see exactly this pattern at work, but worse than ever. Most people know by now that Siri and Alexa are just voice assistants, and as good as the ads look no one is really claiming otherwise. The Watson ads, by contrast, throw around "cognitive computing" to imply real understanding, and then air scripted exchanges that are simply false, rather than selective. Worse, they're doing mass-market ads for a developer-only product, so viewers won't even try it out and see that it doesn't do what's being shown. It may not be the worst on an overall-inaccuracy level, but I get twitchy when I hear people respond to discussions of strong AI with "Oh, basically what that Watson thing does?" And I do hear that, somewhat regularly. Crappy product hype is annoying, but I really wish we could stop telling people we've built real intelligence when we haven't.