4 ms·

> It was enormously expensive, it would have been cheaper to have a human on the other end. This sounds exactly like what someone might have said about early I

• arpinum 5y ago
  Like early mainframes, not every task is a good fit for emerging tech.
• pintxo 5y ago
  While the mainframe is arguably still a success (after all, they still run an amazing number of core services in our society: banks, air-traffic, governmental stuff, ... [1]), it's hard to find any evidence for a successful Watson project [2]. [1] https://www.bmc.com/blogs/state-of-mainframe/ https://www.bmc.com/blogs/state-of-mainframe/ [2] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/16/technology/what-happened-ibm-watson.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/16/technology/what-happened-...
  • seszett 5y ago
    Well I'm still grieving Chef Watson. It probably doesn't count as successful since it didn't make money (I suppose this is why it was retired) but it was great at suggesting recipes from whatever ingredients I had, and ingredient pairings I wouldn't have thought about. I still haven't found anything that works like it.
• josefx 5y ago
  Wikipedia seems to consider the IBM 701 as mainframe and from the customers and special numeric format it had I assume it was used to replace entire floors of human calculators that did nothing but compute the same calculation over and over again. It was also rented for a monthly fee, so the cost comparison was probably straight forward. I wouldn't be surprised if an advanced chat bot with science fiction level AI would replace entire floors of Microsoft call centers at some point in the far future.