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The thing I don’t understand, is we (my team) were doing with Watson (Bluemix / Alchemy, not Watson Assistant) 6 years ago, what ChatGPT is doing now. The diff

The thing I don’t understand, is we (my team) were doing with Watson (Bluemix / Alchemy, not Watson Assistant) 6 years ago, what ChatGPT is doing now. The difference is we had to “build” (Watson let’s you pick sources) a corpus of data, and tune it, but it worked pretty dang well. It did “generative ai” pretty well but we had to be specific, and it was a pain in the ass to configure, but super accurate. For example Watson gave us a paper about how and why adding an after school van would increase student test scores for a failing school. Something the boards missed entirely. Banks use it, a lot of corporations use Watson AI internally. I’m wondering what Watson is doing while all this is going down. It gets real time feeds from all known sources, you can tell it “only give me info from scholarly articles” etc It is stupid expensive however, I’m just wondering if they’re hiding something. It’s definitely not user friendly, but I imagine they have something hardcore hiding

rhn_mk1 4y ago
> adding an after school van would increase student test scores for a failing school What is an "after school van"? A free bus/taxi service for students?
- anon223345 4y ago
  Ya essentially there were schools super underperforming, and when that happens they get a boost of cash to try crazy shit, and if it doesn’t work within X amount of time they shut the schools down. The school boards met, hired my group to try to apply some AI With Watson we put in every known scholarly article about test score performance We asked it “How can I get students test scores up at these schools” Watson was like “try x,y, … free transportation to after school programs, based on expected volume save money using vans instead of busses. In the failing schools, none are near a subway. These research papers have shown x% lift in test scores when transportation options were accessible” And that surprisingly stupid answer was absolutely accurate. The failing schools turned out to have low participation in after school programs, and a large part was the kids had no way to get home
renewiltord 4y ago
Ultimately, I couldn't use Watson to do everyday stuff. But I can with ChatGPT. Watson didn't have the unit economics down.
- anon223345 4y ago
  100% agree. It’s also so stupid expensive and their “free tier” is a joke. If I could play with Watson on my own it would lead me to some cool insights but it’s just not reasonable. The real-time data feeds they have is unreal. They have an entire team dedicated to hooking into data sources and meta modeling, extracting, and linking the data
hiddencost 4y ago
Watson is a . marketing term for a suite of copycat APIs. IBM had a reputation for showing up to conferences with methodologically invalid, grab-bag, overfit models and claiming they had SOTA. Most folks ignored them, and then they used their fraudulent claim of SOTA to sell to AI-naive organizations like banks.
- anon223345 4y ago
  I don’t know, I use Watson and ChatGPT Watson is super accurate because I can define what it’s allowed to give me answers from ChatGPT I love it, but I don’t know where the answers are coming from For example I asked ChatGPT “Leading practices for IdP in cloud” and it spit out an answer Watson I say “leading practices for cloud IdP” BUT essentially I add metadata saying “only from tech journals, AWS official sources, blah blah” It takes me 3 hours to get answer out of Watson but it’s super specific ChatGPT is much quicker but helps me as well, just kinda general and generic in somethings. ChatGPT is super awesome at helping explain shitty code to me which is what I’m starting to explore
  - Timon3 4y ago
    What "Watson" service are you exactly talking about? As in, which IBM Cloud service/offering/page?
    - anon223345 4y ago
      You don’t just use a single service, it’s a pain like that. You basically provision instances and pass data back and forth. You have to use Watson Discovery to find things and update your corpus Watson NLU to make the discovery findings searchable Then you have to do Watson classifiers, and a whole basket of sub-tools etc. But once all that’s set up you can “ask it questions” like you do for ChatGPT
      - Timon3 4y ago
        Okay, then nothing has changed since I last used it. Sadly, even after spending a lot of time connecting the various services, I was never able to get anything even remotely comparable to ChatGPT, even for a single topic. The most "impressive" or natural feeling things I was able to build were based on unreleased internal services, and even those failed to impress beyond acceptable NLU.

rhn_mk1 4y ago

> adding an after school van would increase student test scores for a failing school What is an "after school van"? A free bus/taxi service for students?

anon223345 4y ago
Ya essentially there were schools super underperforming, and when that happens they get a boost of cash to try crazy shit, and if it doesn’t work within X amount of time they shut the schools down. The school boards met, hired my group to try to apply some AI With Watson we put in every known scholarly article about test score performance We asked it “How can I get students test scores up at these schools” Watson was like “try x,y, … free transportation to after school programs, based on expected volume save money using vans instead of busses. In the failing schools, none are near a subway. These research papers have shown x% lift in test scores when transportation options were accessible” And that surprisingly stupid answer was absolutely accurate. The failing schools turned out to have low participation in after school programs, and a large part was the kids had no way to get home

renewiltord 4y ago

Ultimately, I couldn't use Watson to do everyday stuff. But I can with ChatGPT. Watson didn't have the unit economics down.

anon223345 4y ago
100% agree. It’s also so stupid expensive and their “free tier” is a joke. If I could play with Watson on my own it would lead me to some cool insights but it’s just not reasonable. The real-time data feeds they have is unreal. They have an entire team dedicated to hooking into data sources and meta modeling, extracting, and linking the data

hiddencost 4y ago

Watson is a . marketing term for a suite of copycat APIs. IBM had a reputation for showing up to conferences with methodologically invalid, grab-bag, overfit models and claiming they had SOTA. Most folks ignored them, and then they used their fraudulent claim of SOTA to sell to AI-naive organizations like banks.

anon223345 4y ago
I don’t know, I use Watson and ChatGPT Watson is super accurate because I can define what it’s allowed to give me answers from ChatGPT I love it, but I don’t know where the answers are coming from For example I asked ChatGPT “Leading practices for IdP in cloud” and it spit out an answer Watson I say “leading practices for cloud IdP” BUT essentially I add metadata saying “only from tech journals, AWS official sources, blah blah” It takes me 3 hours to get answer out of Watson but it’s super specific ChatGPT is much quicker but helps me as well, just kinda general and generic in somethings. ChatGPT is super awesome at helping explain shitty code to me which is what I’m starting to explore
- Timon3 4y ago
  What "Watson" service are you exactly talking about? As in, which IBM Cloud service/offering/page?
  - anon223345 4y ago
    You don’t just use a single service, it’s a pain like that. You basically provision instances and pass data back and forth. You have to use Watson Discovery to find things and update your corpus Watson NLU to make the discovery findings searchable Then you have to do Watson classifiers, and a whole basket of sub-tools etc. But once all that’s set up you can “ask it questions” like you do for ChatGPT
    - Timon3 4y ago
      Okay, then nothing has changed since I last used it. Sadly, even after spending a lot of time connecting the various services, I was never able to get anything even remotely comparable to ChatGPT, even for a single topic. The most "impressive" or natural feeling things I was able to build were based on unreleased internal services, and even those failed to impress beyond acceptable NLU.