5 ms·

To me, the main mistake was the series of commercials giving the strong impression that IBM already had this incredible Artificial General Intelligence that was

by 1e-9 8y ago

To me, the main mistake was the series of commercials giving the strong impression that IBM already had this incredible Artificial General Intelligence that was indistinguishable from a highly intelligent human and was solving a myriad of difficult practical problems better than any expert. I suspect that most who were well-versed in AI felt the ads were disingenuous from the start. I know I did. I think the marketing campaign would have better served IBM had it laid out their commitment to achieve these things without sounding like they were already there.

Waterluvian 8y ago
In my opinion you don't even need to be an expert. - if you're a generally competent, learned person - and the new product feels like a giant leap from anything that exists already - it's likely not all it claims to be.
- scrooched_moose 8y ago
  I've always had a 20% threshold If anyone is promising a 20% or greater improvement over the current leaders, I immediately file it away as a scam until I see extraordinary proof. Other than some very immature industries, even 20% leaps don't happen without earth shattering once-in-a-generation breakthroughs. Some call me a pessimist, and occasionally I'm unfairly dismissive of new technologies. But for every one I get wrong, I get 99 others correct.
  - randomsearch 8y ago
    When Google first arrived, I’d say the improvement was way more than 20%. Did you experience that?
    - Rexxar 8y ago
      Search was not a mature industry at all.
      - randomsearch 8y ago
        Compared to AI? I wouldn’t say search was more immature than Cloud APIs for AI, if that comparison even makes sense.
      - ethbro 8y ago
        I'd definitely include that as a qualifier to the rule. Mature and/or competitive. 20%+ without a breakthrough can absolutely happen in niche industries that have historically lacked competition.
  - smnrchrds 8y ago
    How do you define immature? AI seems to be quite immature even compared to other subjects in computer science, which is as a whole quite young.
  - scottlegrand2 8y ago
    CUDA delivered a 10x to 100x performance boost on legacy code for real. The hardware had been capable of doing this for at least a generations previously but it lacked a few operations to make it accessible and efficient. What I think made people miss it is no one wanted to refactor their code to run efficiently on GPUs. It wasn't that hard to do so in a lot of cases but it was work. And all this set the stage for deep learning. It was the opening act if you will...
    - sk5t 8y ago
      > CUDA delivered a 10x to 100x performance boost on legacy code CUDA offered a way to access a limited set of operations on special-purpose hardware with a rewrite of critical sections. A pretty far cry from 'boosting legacy code.'
  - megy 8y ago
    > If anyone is promising a 20% or greater improvement over the current leaders, I immediately file it away as a scam until I see extraordinary proof. Ha, this is just silly. Ok, so what percent were IBM promising? How do you ever reduce anything complicated into a percent change.
  - Bjartr 8y ago
    I feel like people are interpreting your "20%" criteria more literally than you intended.
jarl-ragnar 8y ago
To me it seemed obviously overhyped. Having worked in the machine learning/AI field back in the 90s all the claimed capabilities of Watson didn't seem credible.
hopler 8y ago
IBM have been doing this since Deep Blue, if not older. It's their core business model: build cool tech demos and then sell consulting deployments that use nonexistent features of the tech
- ethbro 8y ago
  > sell consulting deployments that use nonexistent features of the tech Sell consulting deployments that hope to fund development of promised features of the tech. Consulting is a bit like used car selling. If you're not playing close to the line, then someone else is. Which, okay. Is what it is. But every customer should be aware this is what IBM et al.'s business model is, unless you're simply buying bodies.
- RichardCA 8y ago
  I think it runs deeper than that. I think the mythology of the "Electronic Brain" goes back to the 60's and all the Space Age idealism about technology. Maybe I'm just naive, but I really think that strand still exists in IBM's corporate DNA. They still see this as solvable given sufficient time and effort.
evrydayhustling 8y ago
The commercials are the public-facing tip of a much larger iceburg of enterprise-scale sales and marketing. Big institutions gave Watson a shot because they created a machine that maximized FOMO with intriguing demos, reduced risk with the "nobody gets fired for buying IBM effect", and perhaps most importantly pitches projects that were large enough to move the needle and make the career of a high level administrator. When you realize how much positioning is required for large scale sales, you can start to understand why the same company might not have the feedback loops in place to build a product.
- ackbar03 8y ago
  Is it possible that the marketing people just didn't really understand the technology and let their imagination carry them away
DebtDeflation 8y ago
>To me, the main mistake was the series of commercials giving the strong impression that IBM already had this incredible Artificial General Intelligence 100% correct. Had IBM marketed Watson for what it actually is - an enterprise version of Amazon Alexa or Google Assistant (which admittedly didn't even exist at the time) - they'd be in a completely different spot. Instead we got the Bob Dylan commercials (which under the covers was just speech to text, a hardcoded dialog tree, and text to speech) and all the "Watson is curing cancer" nonsense (which under the covers was just a rules engine sitting on top of a search engine intended to provide customized treatment plans). The actual technology works, but it's an NLP platform for building chatbots and search engines (think intent classifier, relevancy ranker, named entity/semantic relationship/sentiment annotators) not the AGI that it was marketed as.

by 1e-9 8y ago

Waterluvian 8y ago

In my opinion you don't even need to be an expert. - if you're a generally competent, learned person - and the new product feels like a giant leap from anything that exists already - it's likely not all it claims to be.

scrooched_moose 8y ago
I've always had a 20% threshold If anyone is promising a 20% or greater improvement over the current leaders, I immediately file it away as a scam until I see extraordinary proof. Other than some very immature industries, even 20% leaps don't happen without earth shattering once-in-a-generation breakthroughs. Some call me a pessimist, and occasionally I'm unfairly dismissive of new technologies. But for every one I get wrong, I get 99 others correct.
- randomsearch 8y ago
  When Google first arrived, I’d say the improvement was way more than 20%. Did you experience that?
  - Rexxar 8y ago
    Search was not a mature industry at all.
    - randomsearch 8y ago
      Compared to AI? I wouldn’t say search was more immature than Cloud APIs for AI, if that comparison even makes sense.
    - ethbro 8y ago
      I'd definitely include that as a qualifier to the rule. Mature and/or competitive. 20%+ without a breakthrough can absolutely happen in niche industries that have historically lacked competition.
- smnrchrds 8y ago
  How do you define immature? AI seems to be quite immature even compared to other subjects in computer science, which is as a whole quite young.
- scottlegrand2 8y ago
  CUDA delivered a 10x to 100x performance boost on legacy code for real. The hardware had been capable of doing this for at least a generations previously but it lacked a few operations to make it accessible and efficient. What I think made people miss it is no one wanted to refactor their code to run efficiently on GPUs. It wasn't that hard to do so in a lot of cases but it was work. And all this set the stage for deep learning. It was the opening act if you will...
  - sk5t 8y ago
    > CUDA delivered a 10x to 100x performance boost on legacy code CUDA offered a way to access a limited set of operations on special-purpose hardware with a rewrite of critical sections. A pretty far cry from 'boosting legacy code.'
- megy 8y ago
  > If anyone is promising a 20% or greater improvement over the current leaders, I immediately file it away as a scam until I see extraordinary proof. Ha, this is just silly. Ok, so what percent were IBM promising? How do you ever reduce anything complicated into a percent change.
- Bjartr 8y ago
  I feel like people are interpreting your "20%" criteria more literally than you intended.

jarl-ragnar 8y ago

To me it seemed obviously overhyped. Having worked in the machine learning/AI field back in the 90s all the claimed capabilities of Watson didn't seem credible.

hopler 8y ago

IBM have been doing this since Deep Blue, if not older. It's their core business model: build cool tech demos and then sell consulting deployments that use nonexistent features of the tech

ethbro 8y ago
> sell consulting deployments that use nonexistent features of the tech Sell consulting deployments that hope to fund development of promised features of the tech. Consulting is a bit like used car selling. If you're not playing close to the line, then someone else is. Which, okay. Is what it is. But every customer should be aware this is what IBM et al.'s business model is, unless you're simply buying bodies.
RichardCA 8y ago
I think it runs deeper than that. I think the mythology of the "Electronic Brain" goes back to the 60's and all the Space Age idealism about technology. Maybe I'm just naive, but I really think that strand still exists in IBM's corporate DNA. They still see this as solvable given sufficient time and effort.

evrydayhustling 8y ago

The commercials are the public-facing tip of a much larger iceburg of enterprise-scale sales and marketing. Big institutions gave Watson a shot because they created a machine that maximized FOMO with intriguing demos, reduced risk with the "nobody gets fired for buying IBM effect", and perhaps most importantly pitches projects that were large enough to move the needle and make the career of a high level administrator. When you realize how much positioning is required for large scale sales, you can start to understand why the same company might not have the feedback loops in place to build a product.

ackbar03 8y ago
Is it possible that the marketing people just didn't really understand the technology and let their imagination carry them away

DebtDeflation 8y ago

>To me, the main mistake was the series of commercials giving the strong impression that IBM already had this incredible Artificial General Intelligence 100% correct. Had IBM marketed Watson for what it actually is - an enterprise version of Amazon Alexa or Google Assistant (which admittedly didn't even exist at the time) - they'd be in a completely different spot. Instead we got the Bob Dylan commercials (which under the covers was just speech to text, a hardcoded dialog tree, and text to speech) and all the "Watson is curing cancer" nonsense (which under the covers was just a rules engine sitting on top of a search engine intended to provide customized treatment plans). The actual technology works, but it's an NLP platform for building chatbots and search engines (think intent classifier, relevancy ranker, named entity/semantic relationship/sentiment annotators) not the AGI that it was marketed as.