4 ms·

Am I the only one who can't believe a word from IBM after Watson fiasco?

leblancfg 4y ago
Came here to say this. Could be legit for all I know, but I’m not wasting my time clicking through.
Waterluvian 4y ago
This is my immediate thought when I saw “IBM.” If they have a real product they should brand it separately. If they’re just trying to sell more snake oil to big corporate fools, then they’re probably on target.
- cirgue 4y ago
  This is their business model and their marketing targets exactly the group of people who are clueless enough to continue paying them. Why risk selling to someone who has a nose for bullshit by doing anything that implies you have a real product?
- abudabi123 4y ago
  IBM has demonstrated a voice system that can perform as a debater in a lawmaking context. If it is not marketing smoke and mirrors for the C-Suite business lunch or breakfast let's see more of that in ops.
hdesh 4y ago
Can you please explain what the fiasco about Watson is? I know Watson, but not the fiasco part.
- aintgonnatakeit 4y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11751267 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11751267 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14979642 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14979642 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30046432 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30046432
- KRAKRISMOTT 4y ago
  Watson won jeopardy by being an expert system with hand coded knowledge (their NLP parser was written in Prolog) and sophisticated QA text search. It wasn't a pure unsupervised/semi supervised deep learning model so it didn't generalize well to other domains like medicine despite it being hyped as a ML trailblazer.
  - nl 4y ago
    This is complete ignorance of history. Watson (the quiz winner) was in 2011 before the deep learning revolution (which kicked off in 2014 with AlexNet for image recognition). It was probably the pinnacle of old-style natural language processing. The success of that led to a set of basically unrelated tools being released under the IBM Watson brand which were mostly failures.
    - TheOtherHobbes 4y ago
      It seems the market for highly customised quiz-winning applications was much smaller than expected.
      - nl 4y ago
        The market for news about quiz-winning applications was much larger than I expected though! Whose to say which is more important.
      - js8 4y ago
        It remains to be seen how large is the market for search that can subtly and confidently lie to you.
      - rbanffy 4y ago
        ChatGPT could certainly use the ability to come up with correct answers at some point.
- bane 4y ago
  Some other comments here are good but I'll point out that what most people don't understand is that "Watson" is the name of a marketing umbrella, not a technology. Essentially, almost anything at IBM that had AI/ML smell to it got tossed into the "Watson" market bucket. This allowed IBM to push a huge set of technologies that they could then customize and build services around, for a large fee of course. The problem is that most of the AI/ML technologies IBM used were stock, off the shelf, often not even state of the art. You could literally go to a github page or use scikit_learn out of the box to get equivalent or better performing models without being tied to IBM's proprietary, consultant heavy, solutions. The marketing of Watson, tied to the Jeopardy performance, made people think it was the first coming of AGI -- a kind of Skynet moment. It was really just a cobbled together basket of unintegrated, nothing special, industry bog standard AI/ML stuff.
- paxys 4y ago
  Watson as a system was designed specifically to play Jeopardy. After the win it got a lot of global hype behind it and IBM's marketing and sales teams went into overdrive positioning it as some next generation intelligent AI that could help with generic business processes, analytics, medical diagnosis, legal briefs, customer service and every other business area under the sun. Instead, companies that bought into it got the same army of IBM offshore consultants to custom build half-assed solutions for them like before. "Watson" is ultimately a marketing name for a sub-par IT consulting service, nothing more.
ribs 4y ago
Took the words right out of my mouth
top_sigrid 4y ago
I would add the 'IBM Blockchain Platform: Hyperledger Fabric' as a second point.

Came here to say this. Could be legit for all I know, but I’m not wasting my time clicking through.

This is my immediate thought when I saw “IBM.” If they have a real product they should brand it separately. If they’re just trying to sell more snake oil to big corporate fools, then they’re probably on target.

cirgue 4y ago
This is their business model and their marketing targets exactly the group of people who are clueless enough to continue paying them. Why risk selling to someone who has a nose for bullshit by doing anything that implies you have a real product?
abudabi123 4y ago
IBM has demonstrated a voice system that can perform as a debater in a lawmaking context. If it is not marketing smoke and mirrors for the C-Suite business lunch or breakfast let's see more of that in ops.

hdesh 4y ago

Can you please explain what the fiasco about Watson is? I know Watson, but not the fiasco part.

aintgonnatakeit 4y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11751267 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11751267 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14979642 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14979642 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30046432 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30046432
KRAKRISMOTT 4y ago
Watson won jeopardy by being an expert system with hand coded knowledge (their NLP parser was written in Prolog) and sophisticated QA text search. It wasn't a pure unsupervised/semi supervised deep learning model so it didn't generalize well to other domains like medicine despite it being hyped as a ML trailblazer.
- nl 4y ago
  This is complete ignorance of history. Watson (the quiz winner) was in 2011 before the deep learning revolution (which kicked off in 2014 with AlexNet for image recognition). It was probably the pinnacle of old-style natural language processing. The success of that led to a set of basically unrelated tools being released under the IBM Watson brand which were mostly failures.
  - TheOtherHobbes 4y ago
    It seems the market for highly customised quiz-winning applications was much smaller than expected.
    - nl 4y ago
      The market for news about quiz-winning applications was much larger than I expected though! Whose to say which is more important.
    - js8 4y ago
      It remains to be seen how large is the market for search that can subtly and confidently lie to you.
    - rbanffy 4y ago
      ChatGPT could certainly use the ability to come up with correct answers at some point.
bane 4y ago
Some other comments here are good but I'll point out that what most people don't understand is that "Watson" is the name of a marketing umbrella, not a technology. Essentially, almost anything at IBM that had AI/ML smell to it got tossed into the "Watson" market bucket. This allowed IBM to push a huge set of technologies that they could then customize and build services around, for a large fee of course. The problem is that most of the AI/ML technologies IBM used were stock, off the shelf, often not even state of the art. You could literally go to a github page or use scikit_learn out of the box to get equivalent or better performing models without being tied to IBM's proprietary, consultant heavy, solutions. The marketing of Watson, tied to the Jeopardy performance, made people think it was the first coming of AGI -- a kind of Skynet moment. It was really just a cobbled together basket of unintegrated, nothing special, industry bog standard AI/ML stuff.
paxys 4y ago
Watson as a system was designed specifically to play Jeopardy. After the win it got a lot of global hype behind it and IBM's marketing and sales teams went into overdrive positioning it as some next generation intelligent AI that could help with generic business processes, analytics, medical diagnosis, legal briefs, customer service and every other business area under the sun. Instead, companies that bought into it got the same army of IBM offshore consultants to custom build half-assed solutions for them like before. "Watson" is ultimately a marketing name for a sub-par IT consulting service, nothing more.

ribs 4y ago

Took the words right out of my mouth

top_sigrid 4y ago

I would add the 'IBM Blockchain Platform: Hyperledger Fabric' as a second point.