5 ms·

I don't think that Watson was such a terrible product in 2012 check out where the rest of the field was back then. The problem was and still is that general ai

I don't think that Watson was such a terrible product in 2012 check out where the rest of the field was back then. The problem was and still is that general ai are hard to productize, you need to sell the machinery but also the idea that there is going to be a training process and a fairly extensive data processing step and that the result of the first few fairly expensive training may not get results and you need to power trough it and in general you have no guarantee of getting your worth back... It's a very tough sell.

dougSF70 4y ago
The product failed to live up to the marketing. But the purpose of the marketing wasn't to sell Watson "products and services" it's purpose (imho) was to capture more of the type of work that IBM excels at (hardware, services and consulting). The same is true of most corporates "going full throttle" after LLMs - such as ChatGPT and Microsoft - the objective isn't to sell the new-new-thing, the objective is to sell more of the tried-and-trusted old thing with the gloss of the new-new-thing.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- fijiaarone 4y ago
  I ordered a new copy of Microsoft Office and signed up for LinkedIn Sales Navigator after trying ChatGPT. (Zune was out of stock).
  - dougSF70 4y ago
    I am guessing you are the CEO of a manufacturing company based in Wichita, Kansas that needs to migrate its on-prem Pentium III powered server to a cloud solution?
- tristor 4y ago
  > was to capture more of the type of work that IBM excels at (hardware, services and consulting) Anyone who has ever worked on a project IBM touched first, at least since about 1990, would beg to differ. It’s hard to define what IBM excels at without being overly on the nose, but it’s certainly not /providing/ consulting services.
  - BeefWellington 4y ago
    Acquiring and slowly (or not so slowly) destroying companies in markets they want in their portfolio?
  - dougSF70 4y ago
    Like beauty, excelling is in the eye of the beholder. Someone is paying them fees, so they must deliver some value to some firms.
YeGoblynQueenne 4y ago
>> I don't think that Watson was such a terrible product in 2012 check out where the rest of the field was back then. I think you're talking about Watson, the product, as in the attempt by IBM to sell the technology developed for the system that won at Jeopardy. The original Watson was the most advanced NLP system of its time and for many years later. I am not sure but I wouldn't be surprised if it could still run rings around large language models, who are all the rage today, just because it was not actually a bullshit generator and it was designed (and designed well) to retrieve correct answers to questions (and then convert them to questions, because Jeopardy). But then IBM tried to sell it and made a complete mess of it. I am not one to make business analyses but it seems to me that the people who tried to monetize and market Watson's technology were not the same people who developed it.

dougSF70 4y ago

The product failed to live up to the marketing. But the purpose of the marketing wasn't to sell Watson "products and services" it's purpose (imho) was to capture more of the type of work that IBM excels at (hardware, services and consulting). The same is true of most corporates "going full throttle" after LLMs - such as ChatGPT and Microsoft - the objective isn't to sell the new-new-thing, the objective is to sell more of the tried-and-trusted old thing with the gloss of the new-new-thing.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
fijiaarone 4y ago
I ordered a new copy of Microsoft Office and signed up for LinkedIn Sales Navigator after trying ChatGPT. (Zune was out of stock).
- dougSF70 4y ago
  I am guessing you are the CEO of a manufacturing company based in Wichita, Kansas that needs to migrate its on-prem Pentium III powered server to a cloud solution?
tristor 4y ago
> was to capture more of the type of work that IBM excels at (hardware, services and consulting) Anyone who has ever worked on a project IBM touched first, at least since about 1990, would beg to differ. It’s hard to define what IBM excels at without being overly on the nose, but it’s certainly not /providing/ consulting services.
- BeefWellington 4y ago
  Acquiring and slowly (or not so slowly) destroying companies in markets they want in their portfolio?
- dougSF70 4y ago
  Like beauty, excelling is in the eye of the beholder. Someone is paying them fees, so they must deliver some value to some firms.

YeGoblynQueenne 4y ago

>> I don't think that Watson was such a terrible product in 2012 check out where the rest of the field was back then. I think you're talking about Watson, the product, as in the attempt by IBM to sell the technology developed for the system that won at Jeopardy. The original Watson was the most advanced NLP system of its time and for many years later. I am not sure but I wouldn't be surprised if it could still run rings around large language models, who are all the rage today, just because it was not actually a bullshit generator and it was designed (and designed well) to retrieve correct answers to questions (and then convert them to questions, because Jeopardy). But then IBM tried to sell it and made a complete mess of it. I am not one to make business analyses but it seems to me that the people who tried to monetize and market Watson's technology were not the same people who developed it.