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IBM bought visibility with its ad campaigns, and it's trying to buy credibility with this sponsorship, but I'll bet you anything that the only part of IBM that

IBM bought visibility with its ad campaigns, and it's trying to buy credibility with this sponsorship, but I'll bet you anything that the only part of IBM that MIT will use is the brand. The tech will be open-source tools that IBM didn't produce, and it certainly won't be Watson.

cs702 9y ago
Yes, "Watson" is really old technology coupled with costly consulting services. And yes, IBM is far behind Google, Facebook and other Silicon Valley companies in AI research. That said, for MIT, which in some ways is trying to catch up with schools like Toronto and Stanford in AI research, particularly in deep learning, it makes a lot of sense to take the $240 million from IBM to create a dedicated AI research center. I think they have a shot at becoming an important 'center of gravity' for AI research in the East Coast.
- whitenoice 9y ago
  Well MIT CSAIL is an acronym for AI Lab :) and it was founded in 1959. Here is an old link which lists schools particularly strong in different domains of AI - https://www.cs.cmu.edu/Groups/AI/html/faqs/ai/old_ai_general/part1/faq-doc-4.html https://www.cs.cmu.edu/Groups/AI/html/faqs/ai/old_ai_general...
  - cs702 9y ago
    In some ways, MIT needs to catch up. For example, here's a list of deep learning research groups put together by Bengio's group at Montreal as of Oct 2016: http://deeplearning.net/deep-learning-research-groups-and-labs/ http://deeplearning.net/deep-learning-research-groups-and-la... -- MIT is missing from the list.
- johnchristopher 9y ago
  But today anyone can ask IBM for some Watson queries. Which AI services can I buy from Google, Facebook and others ?
  - cma 9y ago
    Voice, image, video, text analysis, translation: https://cloud.google.com/products/machine-learning/ https://cloud.google.com/products/machine-learning/
  - cirgue 9y ago
    > But today anyone can ask IBM for some Watson queries That's the metric for cool AI functionality? The Watson query tool is basically a search engine with a layer of (not super reliable) text synthesis over it. It would be more interesting if they took away everything except the document search and passage extraction stuff, and just presented that.
deleted 9y ago
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cs702 9y ago

Yes, "Watson" is really old technology coupled with costly consulting services. And yes, IBM is far behind Google, Facebook and other Silicon Valley companies in AI research. That said, for MIT, which in some ways is trying to catch up with schools like Toronto and Stanford in AI research, particularly in deep learning, it makes a lot of sense to take the $240 million from IBM to create a dedicated AI research center. I think they have a shot at becoming an important 'center of gravity' for AI research in the East Coast.

whitenoice 9y ago
Well MIT CSAIL is an acronym for AI Lab :) and it was founded in 1959. Here is an old link which lists schools particularly strong in different domains of AI - https://www.cs.cmu.edu/Groups/AI/html/faqs/ai/old_ai_general/part1/faq-doc-4.html https://www.cs.cmu.edu/Groups/AI/html/faqs/ai/old_ai_general...
- cs702 9y ago
  In some ways, MIT needs to catch up. For example, here's a list of deep learning research groups put together by Bengio's group at Montreal as of Oct 2016: http://deeplearning.net/deep-learning-research-groups-and-labs/ http://deeplearning.net/deep-learning-research-groups-and-la... -- MIT is missing from the list.
johnchristopher 9y ago
But today anyone can ask IBM for some Watson queries. Which AI services can I buy from Google, Facebook and others ?
- cma 9y ago
  Voice, image, video, text analysis, translation: https://cloud.google.com/products/machine-learning/ https://cloud.google.com/products/machine-learning/
- cirgue 9y ago
  > But today anyone can ask IBM for some Watson queries That's the metric for cool AI functionality? The Watson query tool is basically a search engine with a layer of (not super reliable) text synthesis over it. It would be more interesting if they took away everything except the document search and passage extraction stuff, and just presented that.

deleted 9y ago

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