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I still maintain that IBM is above everyone else in the AI game, everyone. Thing is that the media doesn't pay proportional attention and respect they do to ot

I still maintain that IBM is above everyone else in the AI game, everyone. Thing is that the media doesn't pay proportional attention and respect they do to other companies that haven't proven anything yet. Where's Google thing that they showed last I/O where an AI would call a business to schedule an appointment? Vaporware.

tziki 8y ago
> Where's Google thing that they showed last I/O where an AI would call a business to schedule an appointment? Vaporware. It's being rolled out at right now: https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/5/18123785/google-duplex-how-to-use-reservations https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/5/18123785/google-duplex-ho...
- bunnycorn 8y ago
  A small group, in a small number of cities... right...
  - tziki 8y ago
    You should just own up to it when you're clearly shown to be wrong. It would reflect much better than doubling down.
    - bunnycorn 8y ago
      It's not on my phone, it's vapor ware, it doesn't work.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
carlsborg 8y ago
Thought experiment: Given the mass unemployment that would come from autonomous self driving vehicles and AI agents that can replace humans: if you had the tech in place would you release it, or wait for something like Universal Basic Income to be rolled out first?
- scarmig 8y ago
  I don't buy the idea that IBM is ahead of Google by a long shot, but the idea that Google is waiting for a Universal Basic Income to release its economy wrecking AIs is even sillier.
- maxxxxx 8y ago
  You have to release it and let things work out. Something like UBI will only happen if it's 100% clear that there is no alternative.
- paraditedc 8y ago
  I know this is hugely unpopular, but...that sounds like a problem that communism was initially designed for, where productivity is so high that people can just take what they need.
  - deleted 8y ago
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ASpring 8y ago
This is unexpected, but now I'm curious. How are you using "AI" here? Are there other things you would point to that indicate IBM is ahead of everyone else?
krona 8y ago
The problem with their ML strategy is that it consistently over-promises and under-delivers. The marketing and messaging doesn't trail the research; the research is driven by the corporate messaging by half a decade or more. It's completely backwards, and that's just the start, but it's what you should expect from a corporation paralysed by risk aversion. Some of the insider postmortems on Watson Health that are floating around on the internet are... interesting.
- joelthelion 8y ago
  I suspect that they are not genuinely pursuing AI as a business, but as a means to advertise their brand in order to sell their more conventional services.
datguacdoh 8y ago
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/12/19/google-duplex-restaurant-reservation-review.html https://www.cnbc.com/2018/12/19/google-duplex-restaurant-res... Sounds like they are gearing up for a launch.
malcolmgreaves 8y ago
IBM hasn't been a technology company for well over a decade. Watson is garbage vaporware: an abject failure. I worked on it for a bit.
shaklee3 8y ago
What successful products do they have that use AI? From all the talk on HN, Watson is all marketing.
verdverm 8y ago
IBM is good at AI research in silod teams and applications, terrible at turning it into a product and integrating the Watson portfolio. Worked there too, devops'n several Watson techs. IBMs biggest problems are still cultural, middle management and recruiting / retaining skilled developers. This is why they cannot deliver on the hype their amazing marketing teams create.
- notgritty 8y ago
  How can they be good at ML/AI if the people that work there have a fraction of the intelligence of researchers at FB/Google?
  - maxxxxx 8y ago
    " How can they be good at ML/AI if the people that work there have a fraction of the intelligence of researchers at FB/Google? " They have plenty of very, very smart people. The researchers are not IBM's problem but the management that is not capable of bringing that research to market.
    - notgritty 8y ago
      I’m skeptical. There are lots of companies that top ML experts turn their nose at (Salesforce, Amazon) and I can’t imagine that IBM would attract better people than that.
      - verdverm 8y ago
        Do you think that only top researchers are capable of moving the needle? And that these researchers only work at brand name AI companies. It seems FB and Google have had more negative societal impacts (ie fake news, public manipulation) than IBM, Salesforce, and numerous other niche AI companies. We all need a more nuanced perspective on all thinks than this absolutism we have embraced as a society, online.
rhacker 8y ago
> I still maintain that IBM is above everyone else in the AI game, everyone. Yeah I don't know about that. At best they are starting to incorporate deep learning into Watson. I'm guessing Watson has always been a rules engine and more specifically one designed with a lot of statistical analysis. That's far below the level of sophistication we're at with NNs. This is IBMs page on deep learning: https://www.ibm.com/cloud/deep-learning https://www.ibm.com/cloud/deep-learning While it might be nice to use whatever that tool is - it's a wrapper on top of Tensorflow/Keras or Pytorch... Wouldn't it make sense for it to be a wrapper on top of "Watson's API" whatever that is.
- DebtDeflation 8y ago
  > Yeah I don't know about that. At best they are starting to incorporate deep learning into Watson. I'm guessing Watson has always been a rules engine and more specifically one designed with a lot of statistical analysis. There's so much confusion in the market as to what Watson is, and much of it is IBM Marketing's fault. Watson is a Natural Language Processing platform. At a low level it does all the standard NLP stuff - tokenization, part of speech tagging, lemmatization, dependency parsing, co-reference resolution, stopword removal, synonym expansion, etc. Some of this is rule based, some is ML based. Building on top of that you have stuff like an Intent Classifier, Passage Retrieval with a Ranker, Named Entity extraction, Relationship extraction, and Sentiment tagging. Building on top of that, you have the actual commercial applications - chatbot/assistant, semantic search engine, knowledge graph, etc. That's what it is. It's not vaporware or smoke and mirrors, but it's obviously not AGI either.
- YeGoblynQueenne 8y ago
  Like I say in a previous comment, and if memory serves, the original Watson system that beat the two human players in Jeopardy already used deep learning to train the transitions of a natural language chart parser. They didn't just suddendly discover deep learning. It's probably just their marketing team being hopelessly clueless about the tech.
ivalm 8y ago
I don't think you're right. All the exciting new papers/conference proceedings are coming from Google/Facebook/etc, what's an exciting work that IBM did recently? What IBM is good at is marketing, I don't know of actual advances in modern ML that are coming from there.
YeGoblynQueenne 8y ago
>> I still maintain that IBM is above everyone else in the AI game, everyone. IBM are much more open to mixing up statistical machine learning and symbolic AI, and benefit from the advantages of both. For instance, Watson used a chart parser with transitions learned using deep learning [1] to fill in frames [2] from a natural-language sentence (the challenge sentence in the Jeopardy game) and also Prolog to identify relations between elements of the parse so as to figure out the sentence's context. Other big AI players are pretty much exclusively focused on statistical machine learning and, in particular, deep learning, and then again for very specialised tasks like image recognition, speech recognition and machine translation. IBM on the other hand is building broader-scope systems, that perform more nuanced, less strict functions; like in this example, debating, or question answering (essentially) with Watson. So yes, in some sense, IBM is way ahead of the others in creating powerful AI systems. Just let's not confuse IBM's research with the products it tries to sell based on that research. ___________ [1] You'll have to take my word for that- I've read the Watson research papers but my pdf copies of them are now all on a hard-drive that has since crashed and I don't remember how to find them online. [2] A cognitive data structure first proposed by Minsky in the '70s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frame_(artificial_intelligence) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frame_(artificial_intelligence...
genofon 8y ago
IBM is just remarketing old systems as AI, there are plenty of companies, Google as one of the main one, that produce AI innovations, this it's just a PR stunt

tziki 8y ago

> Where's Google thing that they showed last I/O where an AI would call a business to schedule an appointment? Vaporware. It's being rolled out at right now: https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/5/18123785/google-duplex-how-to-use-reservations https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/5/18123785/google-duplex-ho...

bunnycorn 8y ago
A small group, in a small number of cities... right...
- tziki 8y ago
  You should just own up to it when you're clearly shown to be wrong. It would reflect much better than doubling down.
  - bunnycorn 8y ago
    It's not on my phone, it's vapor ware, it doesn't work.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

carlsborg 8y ago

Thought experiment: Given the mass unemployment that would come from autonomous self driving vehicles and AI agents that can replace humans: if you had the tech in place would you release it, or wait for something like Universal Basic Income to be rolled out first?

scarmig 8y ago
I don't buy the idea that IBM is ahead of Google by a long shot, but the idea that Google is waiting for a Universal Basic Income to release its economy wrecking AIs is even sillier.
maxxxxx 8y ago
You have to release it and let things work out. Something like UBI will only happen if it's 100% clear that there is no alternative.
paraditedc 8y ago
I know this is hugely unpopular, but...that sounds like a problem that communism was initially designed for, where productivity is so high that people can just take what they need.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]

ASpring 8y ago

This is unexpected, but now I'm curious. How are you using "AI" here? Are there other things you would point to that indicate IBM is ahead of everyone else?

krona 8y ago

The problem with their ML strategy is that it consistently over-promises and under-delivers. The marketing and messaging doesn't trail the research; the research is driven by the corporate messaging by half a decade or more. It's completely backwards, and that's just the start, but it's what you should expect from a corporation paralysed by risk aversion. Some of the insider postmortems on Watson Health that are floating around on the internet are... interesting.

joelthelion 8y ago
I suspect that they are not genuinely pursuing AI as a business, but as a means to advertise their brand in order to sell their more conventional services.

datguacdoh 8y ago

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/12/19/google-duplex-restaurant-reservation-review.html https://www.cnbc.com/2018/12/19/google-duplex-restaurant-res... Sounds like they are gearing up for a launch.

malcolmgreaves 8y ago

IBM hasn't been a technology company for well over a decade. Watson is garbage vaporware: an abject failure. I worked on it for a bit.

shaklee3 8y ago

What successful products do they have that use AI? From all the talk on HN, Watson is all marketing.

verdverm 8y ago

IBM is good at AI research in silod teams and applications, terrible at turning it into a product and integrating the Watson portfolio. Worked there too, devops'n several Watson techs. IBMs biggest problems are still cultural, middle management and recruiting / retaining skilled developers. This is why they cannot deliver on the hype their amazing marketing teams create.

notgritty 8y ago
How can they be good at ML/AI if the people that work there have a fraction of the intelligence of researchers at FB/Google?
- maxxxxx 8y ago
  " How can they be good at ML/AI if the people that work there have a fraction of the intelligence of researchers at FB/Google? " They have plenty of very, very smart people. The researchers are not IBM's problem but the management that is not capable of bringing that research to market.
  - notgritty 8y ago
    I’m skeptical. There are lots of companies that top ML experts turn their nose at (Salesforce, Amazon) and I can’t imagine that IBM would attract better people than that.
    - verdverm 8y ago
      Do you think that only top researchers are capable of moving the needle? And that these researchers only work at brand name AI companies. It seems FB and Google have had more negative societal impacts (ie fake news, public manipulation) than IBM, Salesforce, and numerous other niche AI companies. We all need a more nuanced perspective on all thinks than this absolutism we have embraced as a society, online.

rhacker 8y ago

> I still maintain that IBM is above everyone else in the AI game, everyone. Yeah I don't know about that. At best they are starting to incorporate deep learning into Watson. I'm guessing Watson has always been a rules engine and more specifically one designed with a lot of statistical analysis. That's far below the level of sophistication we're at with NNs. This is IBMs page on deep learning: https://www.ibm.com/cloud/deep-learning https://www.ibm.com/cloud/deep-learning While it might be nice to use whatever that tool is - it's a wrapper on top of Tensorflow/Keras or Pytorch... Wouldn't it make sense for it to be a wrapper on top of "Watson's API" whatever that is.

DebtDeflation 8y ago
> Yeah I don't know about that. At best they are starting to incorporate deep learning into Watson. I'm guessing Watson has always been a rules engine and more specifically one designed with a lot of statistical analysis. There's so much confusion in the market as to what Watson is, and much of it is IBM Marketing's fault. Watson is a Natural Language Processing platform. At a low level it does all the standard NLP stuff - tokenization, part of speech tagging, lemmatization, dependency parsing, co-reference resolution, stopword removal, synonym expansion, etc. Some of this is rule based, some is ML based. Building on top of that you have stuff like an Intent Classifier, Passage Retrieval with a Ranker, Named Entity extraction, Relationship extraction, and Sentiment tagging. Building on top of that, you have the actual commercial applications - chatbot/assistant, semantic search engine, knowledge graph, etc. That's what it is. It's not vaporware or smoke and mirrors, but it's obviously not AGI either.
YeGoblynQueenne 8y ago
Like I say in a previous comment, and if memory serves, the original Watson system that beat the two human players in Jeopardy already used deep learning to train the transitions of a natural language chart parser. They didn't just suddendly discover deep learning. It's probably just their marketing team being hopelessly clueless about the tech.

ivalm 8y ago

I don't think you're right. All the exciting new papers/conference proceedings are coming from Google/Facebook/etc, what's an exciting work that IBM did recently? What IBM is good at is marketing, I don't know of actual advances in modern ML that are coming from there.

YeGoblynQueenne 8y ago

>> I still maintain that IBM is above everyone else in the AI game, everyone. IBM are much more open to mixing up statistical machine learning and symbolic AI, and benefit from the advantages of both. For instance, Watson used a chart parser with transitions learned using deep learning [1] to fill in frames [2] from a natural-language sentence (the challenge sentence in the Jeopardy game) and also Prolog to identify relations between elements of the parse so as to figure out the sentence's context. Other big AI players are pretty much exclusively focused on statistical machine learning and, in particular, deep learning, and then again for very specialised tasks like image recognition, speech recognition and machine translation. IBM on the other hand is building broader-scope systems, that perform more nuanced, less strict functions; like in this example, debating, or question answering (essentially) with Watson. So yes, in some sense, IBM is way ahead of the others in creating powerful AI systems. Just let's not confuse IBM's research with the products it tries to sell based on that research. ___________ [1] You'll have to take my word for that- I've read the Watson research papers but my pdf copies of them are now all on a hard-drive that has since crashed and I don't remember how to find them online. [2] A cognitive data structure first proposed by Minsky in the '70s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frame_(artificial_intelligence) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frame_(artificial_intelligence...

genofon 8y ago

IBM is just remarketing old systems as AI, there are plenty of companies, Google as one of the main one, that produce AI innovations, this it's just a PR stunt