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IBM is not doing "cognitive computing" with Watson (2016)

• Dryken 8y ago
  Anyway none of the company that pretend doing AI are actually doing AI. AI nowadays is pure branding bullshit.
  • flamtap 8y ago
    I heard someone say that A.I. is just what we call technology that doesn't work yet. Once it works, we give it a specific name, like "natural speech recognition".
    • baxtr 8y ago
      I like that definition too (I know it from Seth Godin). It’s honest, in the sense that we just don’t know yet how to that stuff instead of labeling every single code of line as AI.
    • goatlover 8y ago
      However, if a robot from scifi were to walk out of the lab, like Data or Ava from Ex Machina, or we had access to HAL or Samantha from Her, we wouldn't just give it a specific technical name. We would consider those to be genuine AIs, in that they exhibit human-level cognitive abilities in the generalized sense. It's true that in Her, Samantha was just an OS at the start, kind of like how the holographic doctor was just a hologram at the beginning of Voyager, but as both stories progress, it becomes clear they are more than that. By the end of Her, Samntha and the other OSes have clearly surpassed human intelligence. Those are fictional examples, but they illustrate what we would consider to be genuine artificial intelligence and not just NLP or ML. The reason people always downplay current AI is because it's always limited and narrow, and not on the level of human general intelligence, like fictional AIs are.
    • gnode 8y ago
      I think a reason for this is that in the early days of computing and AI research, strong AI / artificial general intelligence (AI possessing equivalent cognitive abilities to humans) was considered both to be within reach, and the most obvious solution to many problem domains. We now realise that things such as computer vision and natural language translation can be approximated with solutions falling far short of strong AI.
  • jcrotor 8y ago
    Not sure what you mean by that. Is there some industry standard around the term "Artificial Intelligence"? I agree that its become a bit of a buzzword, but I'm not sure that its being misused.
    • solarkraft 8y ago
      When I hear AI I usually imagine deep learning, but many companies using the term don't specify.
      • jhbadger 8y ago
        But that's more "machine learning" which always seemed less "sexy" than AI -- basically just regression but better, not magical like AI.
        • kthejoker2 8y ago
          I will say that when my company uses AI, they almost always just mean LSTM-based content generators - usually chatbots or "advisory"-style outputs - but the key idea is that it's generative and not just an evaluator. I think that's probably the most helpful definition because your ML output has to go into some larger intelligence system (human or otherwise) to produce some decision / activity. So your choices are: * Human * Expert system with rules of interpretation that include ML output as input * AI system which relies solely on inference and reinforcement / goal-seeking to produce output
  • neolefty 8y ago
    Personally I define AI as software that you "train" rather than "program". In the sense that neural nets and other ML tools function as black boxes rather than explicit logic. By that definition, AI is a real thing—it's built on top of programming that uses compilers and languages and ones and zeros—but it's different and it's valuable. To say it's all bullshit, I feel, is to cut yourself off from new skills. Kind of like "compilers are all bullshit—it's opcodes at the bottom anyway."
    • cirgue 8y ago
      AI carries a set of connotations in popular imagination that a) don't comport with the actual capabilities of what we term 'AI' in the computer science world, and b) are being exploited by marketing teams at IBM and plenty of other companies to sell technologies that aren't particularly new or interesting. The kernel of truth in 'AI is bullshit' is really that the discourse around AI is bullshit, which I think is a pretty fair assessment, and this is coming from someone who's work gets labeled as AI on a regular basis.
    • Clubber 8y ago
      >I define AI as software that you "train" rather than "program". I like this definition. It covers things that are AI but not ML, like DSS / rules engines. I've built two fairly sophisticated DSS before but haven't messed with ML much. It seems interesting, but I haven't had the time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decision_support_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decision_support_system Eliza is the first AI program I came in contact with on the Commodore. It was built in the 60s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA AI is a very broad subject and ML is just a particular (promising) technique to perform AI.
• seibelj 8y ago
  "Machine learning" was a pretty good buzz word, but "Artificial Intelligence" is even better. And in a way, ML is part of AI so it isn't really lying. IBM tries to sell into c-suites of companies that are less technically-adept than the average HN reader. Their marketing seems to be pretty effective, at least in getting proof of concept projects signed with big names. Watson is simply IBM's ML product, but they call it AI and wrap it in marketing for all the reasons every AI startup does the same thing.
  • AndyNemmity 8y ago
    I disagree that companies implementing "AI" are less technically-adept than the average HN reader. This sort of comment has happened on other similar discussions. It is untrue. They are very technically adept, with teams of people who are also aware of their problem spaces, and technology. I understand there are some cases of lack of technical teams making these sort of decisions, but it isn't the norm, and even smaller companies often have incredibly technical teams. I don't understand where this idea comes from. I've done consulting, and implementation of these type of projects for most of my life. My experience says it's false. What is the feeling that this is true? Is it from people who aren't a part of the process theorizing that some unknown force must not be as intelligent as they are? Is it from looking at the decision making in general (why did they buy an ERP?), and making correlations? I'm honestly unsure how there's this widespread idea that there aren't brilliant people everywhere doing the same work they are. Yes there are problems, and challenges all over the place, but I find I am amazed all across the country, and world at the level of expertise in companies.
    • jiveturkey 8y ago
      > I disagree that companies implementing "AI" are less technically-adept than the average HN reader. He didn't say that. He said that the c-suite of those companies was less adept than our fellow readers. This is almost certainly true. I'm not sure that it matters.
• nartz 8y ago
  The way IBM talks about it is completely bs. However, this round of AI is definitely better than the last one. Specifically, whats different this time around is that previously, expert based systems and many machine learning techniques require that you specifically hand code things like: 1. Parsing and providing the input dataset into 'features' 2. Hand coding the logic and rules for many different cases (Expert systems) Now, it has become easier to train a model such as a neural net where you can provide much 'rawer' data; similarly you just provide it a 'goal' in the form of a loss function which it tries to optimize over the dataset. By 'true' AI, I think most people mean 'how a human learns' - which is actually a very biased thing, since we humans have goals of things like the need to survive, etc. I do believe it would be possible to encode these into goals, although doing that properly and more generically seems a little bit in the future.
  • DenisM 8y ago
    Feature design is still the prevailing part of machine learning though.
  • BadThink6655321 8y ago
    Actually, what makes us human is the lack of fixed goals. As McCarthy wrote circa 1958, one of the properties of human level intelligence is that “everything is improvable”. That means innate knowledge that nothing is ever good enough, and an uneasy tension between settling on an answer and the drive to keep going.
  • ModernMech 8y ago
    > since we humans have goals of things like the need to survive, etc. What makes you think AI wouldn't have similar ideas about wanting to continue its existence?
    • goatlover 8y ago
      Current Ai doesn't have any ideas about existing. That's something we'd have to add in to future AI, which goes to the point of the article and over-exaggerated claims about current AI. Caring about one's existence (or even having the notion of a self) isn't something that comes about from crunching large data sets. ML isn't going to result in existential feelings or consciousness.
• EastLondonCoder 8y ago
  It’s an unusually beautiful written article, well worth the read just for the prose. As for the main sentiment that we have a new AI winter, I’m not so sure. My lay person view is that we see quite a lot of commercial success with these systems so the current wave will be well funded for at least a decade.
  • xevb3k 8y ago
    What are the big successes? Speech recognition? Which still seems rather bad to me. Language translation (which for the languages I’m interested in (Japanese) is still almost totally unusable? Self driving cars? Which are not yet in production (and where the social issues are probably far harder than the technical ones, and likely have been since the 90s). Is there some big application if ML that I’m missing that is a clear win?
    • Spooky23 8y ago
      ML is a "big" application at the tools level. Categorization in particular. You're already seeing it in product. Consumer level security video equipment with human detection is pretty accessible now. I can ask my iPhone for pictures of my kids in snow in 2014 and get a pretty good output. Enterprise level categorization of photo and video is a thing. "Smarter" machines are just like smart people, by themselves not very exciting. But give them a purpose or application, and things get exciting.
    • ghaff 8y ago
      A lot of ML behind the scenes. Search, knowledge systems, map routing, etc. You know, the boring stuff that isn’t AI yet. I don’t really disagree with your broader point. I expect a lot of things many think are just around the corner are going to be many years away.
    • stickfigure 8y ago
      Not sure what you are using, but speech recognition is amazing on my android device and has been for years. I rarely ever type anything into my phone anymore. It's a usability gamechanger.
• baxtr 8y ago
  AI is definitely starting to enter the “through of disillusionment” in its hype cycle.
  • cryptoz 8y ago
    Is it really? I don't see that at all. Rather I see AI as finally being entrenched in normal, everyday products and services. AI is here to stay and the hype hasn't even started yet, at least not compared to what's coming. Billions of people own devices that they can talk to, that can talk back, that can translate between more languages than humans can, that know facts about you that you didn't even know yourself, etc. Basic AI has come to be an expectation of many consumer products now. And real AI is coming faster than ever. Fake audio and fake video, generated from computers/AI is here. Self-driving cars may be just a domain-specific expertise, but it is still AI by any traditional definition. AI is not reaching any kind of trough of disillusionment that I can tell. We're still obviously just getting started with what can be done. </AI hype post.>
    • baxtr 8y ago
      Yeah, I guess you’re right, too :-) It’s definitely true for ML. However, I was mainly thinking about the overhyped “AI can do anything” sort of nonsense that is mostly spread by people who don’t have any clue about CS
    • nkassis 8y ago
      While there are domains where AI is having successes, the current general expectation is far ahead of where the technology is. People think (and in part due to the marketing like IBM is putting out) that ML/AI can do things that aren't possible yet. There may be a reset in expectation soon which will lead to become more pessimistic at claims being made and the marketing. Once we are through that, it will be easier to get people to understand what use cases align with the available technology and implementing ML/AI will become more productive. Aka the Trough of Disillusionment followed by the plateau of productivity.
  • gaius 8y ago
    The real time voice translation Microsoft is doing in Skype is genuinely impressive. Pity the rest of the app is so shonky!
• xemdetia 8y ago
  Having had some level of access to inside IBM the whole cognitive initiative has just been this bizarre self-feeding marketing sales escalation where the real engineering has to 'bring the cognitive' in the most Dilbert pointy-haired boss sort of way.
• raincom 8y ago
  Chomsky calls it a sophisticated form of computational behaviorism. Just like the research program of behaviorism died out, this will eventually too. There are other respectable criticisms of AI, like Hubert Dreyfus' 'What computers can't do'. Neither Chomsky nor Dreyfus claimed that machine learning and/or AI won't solve any problems, but rather that the kind of problems these solve are not relevant in terms of aspiring to be humans.
  • spearmunkie 8y ago
    Chomsky's "Where AI went wrong" is often ignored by the mainstream AI community or dismissed. Peter Norvig's retort was poorly constructed, and showed that he didn't comprehend Chomsky's argument. Machine Learning and AI are stuck in a rut and apparently these so called ML/AI experts know better. The Deep Learning (along with ML) craze is a hindrance to a true scientific theory of intelligence.
• thomasedwards 8y ago
  I think the biggest concern is that the general public outside of this industry think that AI and machine learning is Hey Google not understanding them and their bank working out you’ve run out of money – which they already know. When AI _actually_ arrives, they’ll be bored, ignore it, and then, well, I guess it’ll know and take over the world. We’re all doomed.
• fallingfrog 8y ago
  I saw a demo of Watson a couple years ago at a trade show and was not super impressed. Looked like a glorified Markov chain to me.
• ChuckMcM 8y ago
  The author's particular gripe is that the Watson advertisements showing someone sitting down and talking to "Watson." They bother me as well (and did so when I was working at IBM in the Watson group) because they portray a capability that nothing in IBM can provide. Nobody can provide it (again to the author's point) because dialog systems (those which interact with a user through conversational speech) don't exist out side specific, tightly constrained, decision trees (like voice mail or customer support prompts). If SpaceX were to advertise like that, they would have famous people sitting in their living room, on mars, and talking about what they liked about the Martian way of life. In that case I believe that most people would understand that SpaceX wasn't already hosting people on Mars. Unfortunately many, many people think that talking to your computer in actually already possible, they just haven't experienced it yet. Not sure how we fix that.
  • albertgoeswoof 8y ago
    Kinda how Tesla advertises autopilot as a self driving car that's safer than human drivers? > Full Self-Driving Hardware on All Cars > All Tesla vehicles produced in our factory, including Model 3, have the hardware needed for full self-driving capability at a safety level substantially greater than that of a human driver. https://www.tesla.com/autopilot/ https://www.tesla.com/autopilot/
    • Judgmentality 8y ago
      Am I extreme in feeling someone should go to jail for that? It was bad enough when they were originally advertising it, but now that they're defending it even after people died...ugh. https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/28/17172178/tesla-model-x-crash-autopilot-fire-investigation https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/28/17172178/tesla-model-x-cr...
      • GW150914 8y ago
        I think if anything you’re overly conservative for thinking somone rather than many people need jail time for it. I would look up the line of people who made and supported the decision for that kind of fraudulent marketing and drag them all into court.
• metabaudoom 8y ago
  It's not new! IBM does what it's best at which is advertising.
• clavalle 8y ago
  I briefly worked with a Watson team on a cool idea to map a person's 'knowledge space' (or probable knowledge space given their background) against Watson's knowledge space and guide them to relevant learning materials and journal articles and the like. The idea was to save people time so they aren't rehashing stuff they know down pat or jumping ahead into material they cannot understand but, instead, find that next step into what they almost know. The idea from there would be to let them specify where they want to go and guide them, step by step, exposure by exposure, to that summit. In a few days, it turned into Just Another News Article Recommendation Engine based on interest and similar profiles with other clients. Yawn.
  • ironchief 8y ago
    I'm interested in the original idea. Can you expand on how your ideal system would function?
    • clavalle 8y ago
      Well, the hope was that Watson, having explored and built a connected knowledge graph from various sources, could ask probing, adaptive questions to find out where a person landed. So, say I'm an undergrad at a good university and I tell the system "I'm interested in Computer Science. I am particularly interested in Scientific Computing and would like to get to a graduate level of knowledge." The system might ask "Sort the following operations by their worst-case run-time...". Then, if they do well there, maybe "Which of these two examples of auto-parallelization using Matlab's parfor would fail to parallize the code.." or something like that. Over the course of so many questions, the system would start to paint a more and more reliable picture of where contours of a person's knowledge. This is time-consuming, of course, but over time it would get easier and faster to find contours by using the 'average' of people with similar backgrounds as a starting point. Once a fairly good mapping is done of the person to Watson's cognitive model, Watson would need to trace back to the source(s) of nearby concepts and offer them to the user, which, ideally, are then rated by the user for relevance and perceived difficulty to further refine the person's model and rank the material offered for that particular profile. Now imagine a Grad Student asking a similar question. Or a middle school student. What would those interactions look like? The mappings? The suggestions? Don't get me wrong...mapping a person's knowledge space is a Very Hard Problem. Watson takes a kitchen sink approach that just isn't possible for a human being. And maybe it wouldn't be possible to tease apart the resulting cognitive model into tidy nodes enough to map anything to. These were questions I'd hoped that IBM could help answer. Instead, it was on to the easy, well-understood problem and solution.
• jacquesm 8y ago
  Watson is the IBM marketing department going mad about ways in which IBM can continue to remain relevant in a world that increasingly doesn't care about what hardware a particular computer program runs on. If there is going to be a 'second AI winter' I fully expect Watson and other such efforts to be the cause.
  • CivilEngineer 8y ago
    For AI and deep learning, hardware does matter. Specialized machines much more efficient than general purpose CPUs
  • ChuckMcM 8y ago
    IBM hasn't been about the hardware for a long time, instead it has been about the consulting services contract. And when we, as a startup, first engaged with the Watson folks it was clearly a sales funnel for their consulting services. That said, IBM has a tremendous amount of research they have done in AI over the years. It is not that they don't have a lot of interesting technology they can throw at different business problems, it seems like they are having a hard time getting invited to the party if they don't track the same hype buzz that the current ML/AI craze has embraced.
    • jacquesm 8y ago
      The Watson stuff is so oversold it is almost comical. And yes, sure IBM hasn't been about hardware for a long time, they've been a services company for decades now. But as far as AI/ML is concerned Google and Facebook are attracting the top talent these days, Apple and Microsoft much further down the line. What would be nice is if they would take the opposite tack, rather than marketing the hell out of it quietly solve lots of problems that are hard to solve in a traditional way. Every time I hear about Watson it is in the context of something where I ask myself "What's the point of being able to do that?". If all there is to hype is the hype itself then it is hollow.
    • randcraw 8y ago
      Yes. IBM should be best positioned among AI-aware companies to augment and extend "deep" knowledge-bases into the enterprise. The information infrastructure of Jeopardy Watson was impressive and ought to open doors for IBM to partner productively with other info management vendors to modernize and advance that corporate infrastructure which is driven by deep information. But instead it appears the short-term ROI-think of their non-technical SVPs is what's led them astray. IBM continues to make the mistake that the flash bang uber-sexiness of ML (esp deep learning) matters more to the enterprise than deep info management (something which IBM can proffer while most competitors can't). If IBM were smart, they'd leverage their deep experience in databases and IR and promote that side of AI -- smarter info management. IMHO, this could do much more for their bottom line than the stupid pretense that Watson really is HAL 9000.
• dwighttk 8y ago
  (2016)
  • fixermark 8y ago
    "©2018 Roger Schank" at the bottom? Unless that's just an auto-generated copyright output that updates to the current year.
    • dwighttk 8y ago
      that's just auto generated... I saved the bookmark in 2016... could be even earlier. I don't see any dates. Wayback machine has its first saved copy in May 2016 which matches my bookmark. http://web.archive.org/web/20160523070729/http://www.rogerschank.com/fraudulent-claims-made-by-IBM-about-Watson-and-AI http://web.archive.org/web/20160523070729/http://www.rogersc...
• fixermark 8y ago
  "This was about promoting expert systems. Where are they now?" In 2017, Intuit, Inc., owners of Quicken, posted revenue of about $5 billion. Not too shabby.
  • ghaff 8y ago
    Heh. Of course that’s a space with a pretty constrained and well defined set of rules. Until they aren’t of course. Which is why we still have accountants.
  • ballenf 8y ago
    As someone who is currently working on successful commercial product with a strong a expert system component, I agree with the sentiment. The funny thing about this project is that the product owners nor marketers and not even the coders ever use the term "expert system". It just doesn't sell any licenses nor garner any attention. My view is that expert systems are a ubiquitous part of many products to the degree it's hard to even recognize them as such. They're not the main focus of anyone's marketing budget, because that makes about as much sense as promoting your "revolutionary axle technology" to sell a car.
    • fnord77 8y ago
      the term 'expert system' was tainted by AI Winter I. I suspect the term 'Machine Learning' will become a dirty word after AI Winter II.
    • wodenokoto 8y ago
      A bit off topic, but I've been wondering about what expert systems are a lot lately, and I hope you don't mind me asking a few things about them. I started studying machine learning long after statistical models was the absolute standard, and all I really know about expert system, are passing phrases in textbooks about how the world has moved away from it. How does one go about building one? MNIST character recognition is often called the "Hello world of machine learning" ... what is the "Hello world of expert systems?" Is there a modern term for Expert Systems?
• chomp 8y ago
  Yep, matches my experience. We invited IBM to our company to pitch Watson, there was very little that was impressive about it. "Watson" is mostly just a coding services integration team, who will assign a team to add some basic NLP to your web services. Someone with a free weekend and a book on TensorFlow or NLTK can replicate most of what the IBM sales engineers pitch for Watson.
• glup 8y ago
  Dan Klein shared in a graduate NLP class at Berkeley a few years back a AAAI article on Watson back in 2010 (when it actually was a distinct technology stack and not just marketing nonsense). At that time IBM was focused on question answering in Jeopardy. It was pretty clearly incremental rather than novel— Dan used the example to show that 1) ensemble techniques can be effective if done properly and 2) hyper parameters matter, a lot 3) there's human intelligence and then there's Ken Jennings intelligence: looking at precision and percent answered, he's in his own separate league. It made me think a lot about individual differences in terms of declarative knowledge. https://www.aaai.org/Magazine/Watson/watson.php https://www.aaai.org/Magazine/Watson/watson.php
  • snarf21 8y ago
    It was also unclear to me when they did the contest as to whether Watson only had access to the analog audio and/or image of the questions asked. So did they have to parse the question the same as Ken. Also, it was clearly optimized for a specific use case. If the questions were reworded with more clues that were puns or needed inference, I think Ken would have done about the same but Watson would have faired much more poorly.
    • pas 8y ago
      They had the text of the question (the sentence), and they had to parse that and then the resulting question was then sent through a text to speech engine obviously, but there was no speech to text. https://www.ibm.com/blogs/research/2011/01/how-watson-sees-hears-and-speaks-to-play-jeopardy/ https://www.ibm.com/blogs/research/2011/01/how-watson-sees-h... > At exactly the moment that the clue is revealed on the game board, a text is sent electronically to Watson[...]
  • denzil_correa 8y ago
    If anyone is interested, this issue from IBM outlines most parts of Watson in great detail. http://brenocon.com/watson_special_issue/ http://brenocon.com/watson_special_issue/
• zerotolerance 8y ago
  Dear engineers, merit is useless when you're trying to sell something. Authority is king, and people remember emotion and hyperbole. Marketing and sales is almost always about representing authority regardless of merit. The only thing that matters after a Watson sale is if Watson can help solve the problems the customers have.
  • sgt101 8y ago
    Well, there's also the opportunity cost of capex leaked away from areas that it could be productively focused on, also the opex of running the new implementation. And the missed opportunity from building skills in implementing opensource alts - like Tensorflow, for example.
    • zerotolerance 8y ago
      Since we're thinking like CTOs we need to account for risk, not cost. IBM sells Watson to companies with money, and for those clients the factors driving decisions are more often risk and liability. A CTO with budget who chooses to build in-house is taking a big risk. If IBM fails, they can cover their ass with a contract. If they fail in-house there is no such safety net. Easier to save face with the board.
      • plaidfuji 8y ago
        In other words, nobody ever got fired for buying IBM
  • vertexFarm 8y ago
    True, it's well known that engineers don't often have appreciation for the emotionality of marketing. But there's a limit here. We can't just have no-holds-barred hyperbole and outright lying to the point of unfairly deceiving customers. Obviously it takes a legal professional to judge where that line falls, but for something as specialized as this it's hard for laypeople to appreciate the distinction between stretching the truth with enthusiastic self-promotion and full-on false advertising. It's interesting to think about.
• fwdpropaganda 8y ago
  Question: how can the author know what Watson really is doing unless the author worked on Watson? If you're going to try and explain the above to me, don't do it by explaining what Watson "really" is doing (unless you worked on Watson yourself). Explain exactly how you can tell the difference from the outside. As far as I can tell all the author did was point out that Watson made a mistake (saying that Dylan's songs is about love fading) and this is not enough, since humans make mistakes too.
  • abhgh 8y ago
    I am not sure if the author did this (he certainly doesn't mention it), but a lot of what constituted Watson at the time of Jeopardy was published as a set of 17 papers called "This is Watson" in the IBM Journal Of Research and Development. Other than that too, I think you can make a reasonable assessment of any NLP system at this level of abstraction by looking at what is cutting edge in NLP today (by following conference proceedings etc).
• gaius 8y ago
  It’s not just sleazy advertising, the money IBM has taken from cancer research for snake oil is downright fraud in my book
• samfriedman 8y ago
  OT from the headline, but I take issue with the author's claim that Bob Dylan's work doesn't relate to the theme "love fades". Dylan has had a vast career beyond his protest song days, and I'd argue that one of his best albums, "Blood on the Tracks" would be accurately summed up as "love fades".
  • jpttsn 8y ago
    I agree; OP is one of those articles, that start to make a reasonable point only to frame it with a highly debatable specific example.
    • randcraw 8y ago
      Dylan didn't win the Nobel for his songs about faded love, and he won't be remembered for them especially. Schank is 72 years old. He came to know Dylan when when his protest lyrics gave voice to 20-somethings like Schank in the 60's. Like the rest of us, Schank likely remembers Dylan less for his retrospective years thereafter.
      • xamuel 8y ago
        What you've called Dylan's "retrospective" years include an earth-shattering comeback with three top-charting albums in a row starting with 1997's "Time Out Of Mind" (which, incidentally, has quite a few 'love fades' lyrics). Dylan himself has singled out "Time Out Of Mind" as the only one of his own records that he himself goes back and listens to.
  • rustybelt 8y ago
    Thank you. I don't know much about AI, but I like to think I know a little about Bob Dylan. The bittersweet love song is a Bob Dylan staple that lasted well beyond his protest phase. I think Watson actually a pretty good job of identifying it as a theme. From "Girl from North Country" to "Don't Think Twice, It's Alright" to "It Aint Me Babe" to "Tangled Up in Blue" to all the way into the 90's with "Make You Feel My Love", it's a theme that spans his entire body of work.
  • 8y ago
• deisner 8y ago
  "Recently they ran an ad featuring Bob Dylan which made laugh, or would have, if had made not me so angry." Wait, is Roger Schank an AI trying to convince humans that AIs are impotent and harmless? Pretty sneaky, Schank-bot.
• megaman22 8y ago
  Everything IBM says about Watson should be taken with a few tons of salt. I don't know how much I'm allowed to say, but they couldn't even get it to work acceptably internally for some of the basic datamining and natural language processing that are among the things so highly touted in some of their TV advertising. This is with a gargantuan dataset compiled from years of relevant interactions to train on in the particular area of interest.
  • tabtab 8y ago
    Re: Everything IBM says about Watson should be taken with a few tons of salt. How is this different from nearly all other "AI" companies? IBM is not the only one guilty of hype. Neural nets can do specific things well, such as mirror a specific training set well, but still have major gaps in terms of what many call "common sense". It does smell like AI Bubble 2.0 brewing out there.
• sosuke 8y ago
  Something feels wrong about the assessment of the second block of text being written by a human. I feel some conflict in my head that someone would talk about Bob Dylan as "overstepping" a claim about his prominence and then conceding that he does belong in a "Top 10 Bob Dylan Protest Songs list." Of course he belongs in a Bob Dylan list he is Bob Dylan. Does that sound human?
  • jakeinspace 8y ago
    I think the text is pulled from a "Top 10 Bob Dylan Protest Songs Lost" article.
• jimrandomh 8y ago
  IBM's customers probably understand that Watson (the jeopardy-playing bot) isn't really relevant, and that what they're buying isn't a pre-written software package so much as software consulting services. But there's still a serious problem, which is that a customer of Watson would reasonably believe that they're getting the team of engineers that solved Jeopardy. In reality there is no overlap whatsoever in personnel between Watson-the-PR-project and Watson-the-thing-you-hire.
  • huhlig 8y ago
    Watson Services are very much a product you buy/subscribe to. Just like the Machine Learning services you get from Microsoft or Google. You can use them pretty easily with absolutely no consulting at all.
• chisleu 8y ago
  I worked on data systems that fed weather data into Watson. IBM's technology, and IBM's marketing are very different beasts. The marketing is somewhat trivial, but the reality of ML and the Watson data systems is incredible. They are pumping a huge amount of data into it and they have data scientists doing incredible things with the data already. It is the largest growing segment of the company (and maybe the only growing segment of the company.) The marketing of AI, and the realities of ML are always going to be disconnected. Sure, you will likely just get an email that says routine maintenance has been ordered on your elevator, not a box in the corner that tells you in a sexy, clear, non-robotic voice. As for Bob Dylan's songs... Christ. AI winter isn't coming unless the term AI gets squashed and people start calling it ML. This article is pretty FUD.
  • jbob2000 8y ago
    The problem is that all of this AI and ML is being used to target Ads better. You don't need AI and ML to do this, it is a solution looking for a problem. Your example about routine elevator maintenance does't need AI at all. Whoever logs the elevator maintenance can just press a button to send a notification message. Hell, it can be wired up such that when you submit a notification notice, it automatically sends an email. They probably have condo management software that does this already.
    • kthejoker2 8y ago
      Speaking for OP - I think the idea was that ML would determine that your elevator was in need of maintenance and place the order without human intervention. Although the word "routine" belies that, but so.
      • jbob2000 8y ago
        Exactly. We already know when the elevator needs to be maintained. If it isn't being maintained, it's not because people don't know, it's because they are intentionally NOT doing the maintenance, maybe because it costs $120/hr minimum 6 hours.
    • 8y ago
• eeks 8y ago
  Can an mod add the date to the title? This piece is from 2015.
• InTheArena 8y ago
  It's a pretty open secret in the community that what IBM pitches that Watson can do, versus what it (or any state of the art system) really does is pretty much bunk. This author calls it fraud, but a more charitable interpretation would be extreme marketing. We've seen a lot of failures with Watson, particularly in the medical space - MD Anderson's Cancer work for example (https://www.forbes.com/sites/matthewherper/2017/02/19/md-anderson-benches-ibm-watson-in-setback-for-artificial-intelligence-in-medicine/#2533023e3774 https://www.forbes.com/sites/matthewherper/2017/02/19/md-and...) where MD Anderson payed around $40 million (on a original contract deal somewhere near $4 million) and eventually abandoned it. I do think Watson may be a fake it until you make it thing - in particular, they still have access to a incredible amount of data, and data determines destiny on a lot of AI.
  • genofon 8y ago
    but their message is for outside the community, so I don't think they deserve any charitable interpretation, they lost this privilege a long time ago. I have to say I'm biased, I wish I can see them disappear soon, but I think I have the right motivations.
• kevinSuttle 8y ago
  The problem is that even internally, there is this notion of "sprinkling a little Watson to do the hard jobs" and then 'poof': problem solved. Marketing reflects internally, too.
• wintorez 8y ago
  I'm no expert in the field of AI or Machine Learning, so I have a question for the experts here? Has there been any theoretical breakthrough in the AI in the recent years? I knew we had neural networks and different types of classifiers, etc. for more than a few of decades now, so apart from better marketing, has there been a significant breakthrough that explains this sudden surge in the interest in AI?
  • jononor 8y ago
    Before 2005 experts estimated that AIs that could beat humans at Go would take many years still. In October AlphaGo came out and in March 2016 beat everyone. In 2017 AlphaGo Zero came out, which was only trained on self-play. It beats all previous versions. But it is not so much these big breakthroughs that cause current optimism, as much as the large amounts of continuous improvements and refinements.
  • vishvananda 8y ago
    There have been a number of breakthroughs in specific fields recently. In fact it seems like there is a paper every week that pushes the state of the art forward in some branch of AI/ML. I think the big one that triggered the current excitement was the success of convolutional networks in image recognition tasks. You can read about that one (in 2012) here: https://www.technologyreview.com/s/530561/the-revolutionary-technique-that-quietly-changed-machine-vision-forever/ https://www.technologyreview.com/s/530561/the-revolutionary-... EDIT: This paper refers to the algorithm as SuperVision which was the team name, but it is more commonly called AlexNet. Here is another article discussing it: https://qz.com/1034972/the-data-that-changed-the-direction-of-ai-research-and-possibly-the-world/ https://qz.com/1034972/the-data-that-changed-the-direction-o...
    • wintorez 8y ago
      Thank you. The very answer I was looking for.
  • julvo 8y ago
    Recent breakthroughs in ML from a commercial perspective are achieving super-human performance in some computer vision tasks and end-to-end methods beating traditional ones in machine translation and speech recognition. However, these breakthroughs have not much to do with a general notion of intelligence as they are very limited to a specific task. In the media, the term AI is used very inflationary these days.
• laichzeit0 8y ago
  The most ingenious trick that the IBM marketing department pulled was to get non-technical (and probably even technical people, judging by this thread) to think that Watson is some kind of singular thing. Like that it’s a single big neural network with different APIs on it, or something. I honestly think that’s what most people think Watson refers to. Watson is like Google Cloud Platform. It’s just a name for a platform with a bunch of technologies. E.g. Watson Natural Language Understanding was previously AlchemyLanguage. It was just rebranded. It’s very clever though, I’ll give them that. Use a human name so it has all the anthropomorphic connotations and let people think it’s some kind of AI learning things.
  • colivier 8y ago
    I attended the IBM Connections conference in Vegas shortly after the Jeopardy! thing and just after IBM started using Watson as a brand under which it lumped a bunch of analytics products. From questions and comments made, during some of the sessions I attended, it became clear that large portion of the attendees (mostly the business people) wrongly assumed that the technology that won Jeopardy! was now being used inside everything labeled with "Watson". People were very excited by this. I never heard anyone from IBM making any attempt to try and rectify this misconception, they just smiled, nodded and played along. I disliked IBM and their corporate marketing BS even more after this.
  • nilkn 8y ago
    I'm not even convinced Watson is a platform. My impression is that it's just a consulting division of the company that deploys teams to build solutions that are in some way related to AI, with each solution or implementation potentially being completely unique from the ground up. Perhaps someone from IBM can correct me though.
    • landonxjames 8y ago
      I'm currently sitting in a meeting about implementing the Watson Enterprise Search product in my company and that is more or less the impression I've gotten. They sell it as a platform that is easy to customize and then once you're in they bill you tons of hours to help you because the system is indecipherable and poorly documented.
• theschreon 8y ago
  "Search is all well and good when we are counting words, which is what data analytics and machine learning are really all about." There are machine learning models which go far beyond counting words, for example see https://arxiv.org/abs/1502.01710 https://arxiv.org/abs/1502.01710
  • wodenokoto 8y ago
    Parent links to Yann LeCunns's "Text understanding from Scratch" paper, from 2015, where the authors uses a conv-net, originally build for image recognition to do text categorisation. The NN techniques falls squarely in the "counting words"-bracket, although this one is actually counting characters. It is a great paper, with great results, but none of those models therein have an opinion on ISIS, an ability to converse or anything the author of TFA calls cognition.
• jiveturkey 8y ago
  > I started a company called Cognitive Systems in 1981. Ahh. So just from the article, his gripe is of the “begs the question” sort — he’s not pleased with the evolution of idiom. Since he was doing “real AI” back then, who are these frauds to claim they are doing AI? His point may or may not be valid, but his specific argument is quite weak. He notes that even a person, an actual intelligence, wouldn’t know what Dylan was singing about without context. He goes on to presume that Watson doesn’t have context, but who’s to say? Watson could certainly read all the articles about Dylan that he so helpfully cites, and come to “understand” the songs. And maybe Watson has. If you follow the links to his academy, you divine a bit more of the motivation. His software development course provides “a unique automated mentor, employing natural-language processing technology derived from our decades of artificial intelligence research”. He is desperate to stay away from calling it actual AI, yet can’t resist implying that it is. This is probably most irksome to him. My advice: sometimes you have to join ‘em.
  • danpalmer 8y ago
    He specifically addresses that he _wasn’t_ doing “real AI” then, and given they’re doing fundamentally the same or similar things, IBM aren’t now either.
    • jiveturkey 8y ago
      Yes, that is my point (sorry that I mis-stated it a bit). He is offended by the claims of these charlatans when he knows the technology hasn't advanced to the point of being AI. How dare they claim otherwise. Also, he knows that they know it's a lie. Unforgivable. But he's fixated on the literal (once-true) meaning of "AI". It doesn't mean that anymore, not to the lay person and not to the average technologist either. Like "begs the question", one has to just get over it.
      • xfer 8y ago
        Not to the lay person? Really? Do you have any evidence to back it up? Hint: HN is not full of lay persons.
• chshahbaz14 8y ago
  http://earntodie2apk.com http://earntodie2apk.com
• brundolf 8y ago
  I'd like to make a plug for my company (http://www.cyc.com http://www.cyc.com) whose "AI" is not machine-learning based, does actual cognition and generalized symbolic reasoning, and lived through the AI winter of the 80s. We've gotten some contracts as a direct result of companies being disenchanted with Watson's capabilities.
  • mark_l_watson 8y ago
    I would like to ask you a question: over the years I experimented quite a bit with OpenCyc that you stopped distributing last year. Is ResearchCyc reasonable to experiment with on a small server of powerful laptop? Is an OWL version available?
    • _bxg1 8y ago
      OWL is not available, but ResearchCyc will definitely run on a laptop
• mwexler 8y ago
  I always feel that this is one step away from that famous quote, "The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist," attributed to various (https://quoteinvestigator.com/2018/03/20/devil/ https://quoteinvestigator.com/2018/03/20/devil/). In this case, the greatest trick is convincing that it does exist... and maybe is the harder one.
• davidsawyer 8y ago
  Here's a great video that covers "AI winters" for those who are curious: https://vimeo.com/170189199 https://vimeo.com/170189199
• itp 8y ago
  What is the point of changing the headline of an article like this? The headline was an accurate summary of the contents ("THE FRAUDULENT CLAIMS MADE BY IBM ABOUT WATSON AND AI"). Maybe you agree, maybe you don't. But the current headline is just wrong. From the article: > I will say it clearly: Watson is a fraud. I am not saying that it can’t crunch words, and there may well be value in that to some people. But the ads are fraudulent. That's what this is about. Not "Claims made by IBM about Watson and AI."
  • dang 8y ago
    I changed it in a bit of a rush earlier. Note the word "unless" in the site guideline: Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait. "Fraudulent" in the title was guaranteed to provoke objections—you might not consider it misleading/linkbait but other readers would. Normally we look for more accurate and neutral language in the article text to use as a replacement title. Now that I'm not in a rush, it's clear that the subtitle contains such language, so we'll use that instead. Edit: funnily enough, that's exactly what we did with the title when it was posted two years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11751267 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11751267.
  • teach 8y ago
    The HN submission guidelines include the following rule: "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait." The original headline is a bit sensational/clickbaity. That's a judgment call in this case, IMO, but I suspect that's why the title was changed.
    • astro_robot 8y ago
      I wish click bait was more well defined. In this case, I feel the original title summarizes the entire claim made in the article. Using the title "Claims made by..." sounds like it'll be an article summarizing the claims made by AI and Watson, rather than a push back on those claims.
      • dqpb 8y ago
• gfnord 8y ago
  It's just advertising.
  • SahAssar 8y ago
    False advertising. Is that not worth calling out?
• urmish 8y ago
  >A point of view helps too. What is Watson’s view on ISIS for example? >Dumb question? Actual thinking entities have a point of view about ISIS. Dogs don’t but Watson isn't as smart as a dog either. (The dog knows how to get my attention for example.) Ouch. But at the same time, for something that didn't grab his attention he sure had a lot of words to say about it.
• bobthechef 8y ago
  Watson's marketing is obnoxious, but it's not just Watson. There is plenty of bullshit, ignorance, and pseudo-intellectualism to go around. Mind you, many of the technical fruits of AI itself, properly understood, are not bullshit (the name "AI" is misleading IMO; I wouldn't be able to tell you what distinguishes AI from non-AI because it seems largely a matter of convention rather than a substantive difference). The field offers plenty of useful techniques for mechanizing things people have had to do preiously. However, the very idea of a "thinking computer" is unjustifiable and superstitious. There's too much sloppy, superficial thinking. The author of the article mentions concepts and indicates a distinction between them and word counting. Certainly, there is a difference between word counting and conceptualization, and it is patently obvious computers don't do the latter. But it's worse than that. Technically, computers aren't even counting words. They aren't even counting, nor do they have any concept of a word (we count words by first knowing what it is that we should be counting, i.e., words). What we call word counting when a computer does it is a process which produces, only incidentally, a final machine configuation that, if read by a human being, corresponds to a number. The algorithm is a proxy for actual counting. It is a process produced by thinking humans to produce an effect that can consistently be interpreted as the number of words (tokens) in a string. That's not thinking. There is zero semantic content and zero comprehension in that process, and no number of tortured metaphors or twisted definitions can change that. AI, as it becomes more sophisticated, is at best a composition of processes of the same essential nature. No degree of composition -- no matter how sophisticated or complex -- magically produces thought anymore than taking sums of ever more composed and expansive sequences of integers ever gets you the square root of two. It's not a mystery.
• DoctorOetker 8y ago
  Normally my comments are very sceptic, but this article is just spot on. The problem is not only context or subtext, it is even worse from an entirely predictable standpoint: Consider a large corpus of text (books, articles, ...). 1) Concepts that are WELL UNDERSTOOD BY HUMANS will not be explained by humans when they reference them: the word or concept "pet" (as a verb) will show up in many sentences refering to the petting of cats, dogs, horses,... and ML will correctly predict the conjunction of "pet" with any of these words in the sentence. It will even be able to train ML to confabulate realistic sentences in the sense of echolalia. Consider then the sentence: "The lady pets the cat" The computer will recognize that the presence of cat is not surprising (bingo!). The computer will have no idea that this probably involves one or more cycles of the lady's hand gently pressing down on the fur belonging to the cat, then while still preessing down, moving the hand in the 'natural direction of the hairs' (NOT the other way around) probably from closer to the head towards the tail, and probably lifting the hand before repeating the cycle so as to massage the cat or perhaps so as to remind the cat of its time as a kitten being licked by the mother cat. No book or conversation in the corpus will give this detailed description exactly because humans expect each other to understand this. 2) Concepts that are POORLY UNDERSTOOD BY HUMANS will be vigorously (but often erroneously) explained by humans communicating to each other what they think is going on: endless texts about religion, sexuality, perpetuum mobiles, economy, ... How do we even expect the computer to produce a sane result, even if it correctly guesses the context? That said, I do believe relatively helpful natural language processors to be possible, but they will have to be vigorously trained by multiple human curators individually analyzing a sentence and trying to find (probably true) statements about what a sentence implies: Starting again with: "The lady pets the cat" One curator might mention hands touching fur while moving. Another curator might add that one can also conclude the hand probably presses down on the fur. Yet another notes the sentence also implies the lady is still alive, for else she would not be able to pet. The first curator now adds that the cat as well is probably alive, for else the lady would probably not want to pet the cat, since massaging is useless to a dead cat. The third curator now mentions that the sentence implies one or more cycles of an individual pet stroke. Etc... As you can see this quickly becomes an expensive operation. Now one might train an adversarial neural network to look at a sentence (or sentence with context) and a list of probable conclusions, to predict if the list of valid conclusions is complete or incomplete. And then only send the incomplete ones to humans?
• throwawayWatson 8y ago
  I used to work for IBM, but a few years ago. One thing about Watson that I remember is this presentation by a very senior guy. He had just come back from the US and was presenting what he learned there about Watson Healthcare (IIRC, that's what it was called), which I assumed was a division of the Watson team that was focused on cancer and stuff like that. I'm paraphrasing, but during the presentation he said something like: "The project was not originally called Watson Healthcare, it was called X (I can't remember exactly), but potential customers were like 'No, no, leave X, we want Watson', so we had to change the name to Watson Healthcare for the sake of our customers. Watson Healthcare actually doesn't have anything to do with Watson." I couldn't believe, at the time, how much respect I lost for IBM in about 20s. First of all, he thought we're idiots. You have to be brain dead in order to believe that he renamed X to Watson Healthcare in order to help customers. They just wanted to ride the hype train of the Watson brand and were lying to everybody about it.
  • sgt101 8y ago
    his customers are CIO's they need help in selling things to the board, I guess that's what he's talking about.
    • opportune 8y ago
      A lot of CIOs are surprisingly non-technical themselves.
  • RobLach 8y ago
    When your customer is an executive who needs to sell their decision to a board or C-level then pitching "IBM Whatever Health Stuff" is a bit harder than "Watson Healthcare" because of marketing.
• mankash666 8y ago
  Advertising != Peer reviewed publication. Drinking Coke doesn't make you sexy and desirable, as suggested by their ads, just makes you gassy. IBM is allowed some creative liberties in their mass-media advertising campaigns.
• abhgh 8y ago
  Oh wow, Roger Schank [1]! Haven't heard that name in a while - he was quite famous in the early days of AI. I wonder if he has figured out a good way to marry ML to his theory of Conceptual Dependency (CD) [2] - because that would could be ground-breaking for hard NLP problems. Interestingly I started reading the article without paying much attention to who the author is. A few lines in I began to wonder if this is going to be unproductive rant, and if the author has heard of things like CD etc ... It became funny right about then because that's also when I happened to glance at the URL and saw Schanks name. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Schank https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Schank [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conceptual_dependency_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conceptual_dependency_theory
  • mark_l_watson 8y ago
    In the 1980s I spent too much time trying to use Conceptual Dependency in a few small R&D projects. Looked promising, but I had little success with it.
    • abhgh 8y ago
      I think one of the challenges with using CD in the real world is the "unclean" input that need to be mapped to the various primitives and structures of CD, or stuff in the same vein that came after. Without a way to do that automatically, in a scalable fashion and with minimal human assistance, its utility is limited. Which is why I feel that if we had a way to leverage the current breed of ML techniques to automatically (or even semi-automatically) define this mapping, it would be a big step forward.
      • mark_l_watson 8y ago
        Interesting idea!
• wizardhat 8y ago
  I do agree that Watson seems oversold, but the evidence in this article (Watson's shallow opinion of Bob Dylan, compared to the author's opinion of Bob Dylan) seems kind of weak. I was hoping for some insider information on the implementation of Watson, but unfortunately there is none.
• dang 8y ago
  Discussed at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11751267 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11751267.
• jonjojr 8y ago
  I would only refer to Episode 4-5 of Silicon Valley in Season 5. This will be the mistake we will make when we introduce a technology we think it is smart enough to make decision for us and turns out all it does is read words faster than us and interpret them literally. Even with the closing statement of "AI winter is coming soon." I can see Watson having a problem understanding that statement even with context.
• consultSKI 8y ago
  Methinks voice will in fact win.
• braindongle 8y ago
  >...counting words, which is what data analytics and machine learning are really all about The piece is welcome anti-hype, but, what? How can a true expert in the field say something like this? Or, maybe I should tell my colleague who is working on ML for diagnostic radiology to think of voxels as, uh, words?
• crsv 8y ago
  I feel like they've moved on from their lies about Watson's capabilities to lies about their capabilities with blockchain technology.
• deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
• zmmmmm 8y ago
  Had IBM sales people present on Watson as a security solution recently. The stench of BS was so bad I nearly had to leave the room. It wouldn't bother me if they kept things generic, but they deliberately sprinkle the presentations with specific terms referencing hyped technology (deep learning, etc), with the clear objective of deceiving the audience into thinking they are using those technologies when they clearly aren't. It was unethical IMHO.
  • dx034 8y ago
    Did your company still buy it?
    • zmmmmm 8y ago
      No, we aren't quite the target market yet, but I can see the ground is being prepared for when we might be.
• dmccrevan 8y ago
  Machine Learning in a lot of ways is legitimate, but its applications to a lot of NLP / chat-bot technologies is far from cognitive computing.
• intrasight 8y ago
  I remember seeing "Watson" mentioned in the news like five years ago, but besides a couple HN threads, I've not seen it mentioned since then. Am I missing something (besides TV, which I don't watch)?
• wcr3 8y ago
  this is a (poorly) written article about bob dylan. why did you share this. this is insipid.
• whizrd 8y ago
  Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!
• sriku 8y ago
  I don't have gripes with this marketing approach and I read it more as "expect to be surprised by what is possible" rather than harp on what isn't .. at least not yet. For a comparison, it is like apple branding their display tech as "retina display" to communicate the intention (you can't tell pixels apart), possibilities (you can now use any font) and quality rather than any claims about mimicking the eye.
• mathattack 8y ago
  “These guys are a fraud. Come look a thing my online Academy. Call for the price.” Roger Schank used to be a serious researcher. Also tied to consulting firms like Accenture.
• deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
• jameslin 8y ago
  The day AI understands my dirty jokes, it's the day I call it cognitive.
• tjpnz 8y ago
  Isn't it more or less common knowledge now that Watson is all marketing buzz? The Watson that IBM is selling CIOs on is a very different thing from what was seen on Jeopardy.
• plaidfuji 8y ago
  > People learn from conversation and Google can’t have one. It can pretend to have one using Siri but really those conversations tend to get tiresome when you are past asking about where to eat. At first blush he sounds like my technologically semi-literate grandma who would definitely conflate Siri and Google as being part of the same grand internet program. I had to read this twice to understand that in saying "it can pretend to have one using Siri", he meant that asking Siri a question sometimes redirects to a Google search, but wrote it in a way that personified Google as the actor with intent in that transaction. What an odd and paradigm-breaking way to look at that.
• mrdiesel 8y ago
  IBM is shit. Company of lies.
• Zigurd 8y ago
  Start by asking "What is Watson for?" Watson is for helping decisions at large corporate customers: The CEO has heard of Watson. He saw it on a screen in the VIP tent at the golf tournament, and thinks it's neat. The CIO feels safe with "Watson" in an RFP response from IBM because the CEO thinks it's neat. IBM is happy with this pettifoggery because it keeps the SOW vague and open to maximizing revenue from the project. It's not about AI.
• acobster 8y ago
  We won't know how to build machines that understand until we know what understanding actually is at a biological level. I'm not convinced that we do.
  • cicero 8y ago
    I am not even convinced that understanding happens at a biological level. I think there is still a lot that can be done to model aspects of human reasoning in software to produce useful results, especially if it is married with machine learning, but I don't think we will get there by looking at biology.
• daveheq 8y ago
  "People learn from conversation and Google can’t have one. It can pretend to have one using Siri"... Google doesn't use Siri.