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I personally feel Watson was an extremely clever marketing boondoggle. If you think of it, machine learning, neural networks and AI were just making a return i

I personally feel Watson was an extremely clever marketing boondoggle. If you think of it, machine learning, neural networks and AI were just making a return into the public mind around the time they announced Watson. I think somebody thought if they "humanized" AI by making it seem like it was a character, it would make AI seem all that much more closer to the dream. On the face of it, not a horrible idea, but applied to what was essentially a bunch of separate algorithms.. pretty misleading, but that's just an opinion.

cgearhart 5y ago
Worth noting that Jeopardy Watson had very little ML and absolutely no deep learning (it was a few years pre-AlexNet). I don’t even think it used any neural networks; certainly not in any major way because they’re not a major topic anywhere in the press releases, working group notes, or the papers published by the Watson research group. Watson was an incredibly complex mixture of bespoke implementations of “classical” AI and NLP techniques to handle questions of different classes by transforming them into search & information retrieval problems. They were able to make it work pretty well for the very limited domain of questions that arise in Jeopardy, but it was also obviously a Herculean task to generalize that approach. I can totally believe that as executives started to grok what Watson really was they realized that it had more value as a brand than as a technology.