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I'm not sure about Watson's "expensive disaster", because all the public knows is "that charming supercomputer that starred on Jeopardy! and beat the pants off

I'm not sure about Watson's "expensive disaster", because all the public knows is "that charming supercomputer that starred on Jeopardy! and beat the pants off all other human contestants". That was a massive, enormous PR win for IBM and AI across the board. Nobody in the general public will forget that, and that will give a noticeable boost to any AI remotely like Watson, science be damned.

SapporoChris 4y ago
I had forgotten about Watson. I don't normally watch Jeopardy. However, maybe I'm not part of the general public. I did some fast checking, my numbers may be off, but it looks like Jeopardy has a viewership of around 11 million perhaps it was higher in 2011. Now news reports would have spread the word further, but that's a small percentage of the general public of the USA.
HarHarVeryFunny 4y ago
Sure, Watson+Jeopardy was good PR for IBM, as was DeepBlue, but even if the definition of success (vs disaster) is only PR-success, I'm not sure how lasting that is/was for IBM. Certainly from a technical POV Watson was just marketing hype - a common label applied to a grab-bag of unrelated unremarkable products. If you polled people on the street today about which companies they associate with AI, I doubt IBM would come out anywhere near the top. In fact, I'm not sure if you surveyed the under-20 crowd they could even tell you what IBM does, assuming they've even heard of them, other than perhaps being in the computer business in some vague way.
kxyvr 4y ago
It wasn't an expensive disaster for IBM, but it was for MD Anderson Cancer Center, which spent $62 million on a project using Watson that didn't work: https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/876070 https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/876070 Certainly, not all projects work and institutions need to take risk. However, there is a big financial and opportunity cost to this. Rather than spending $62 million on Watson, and assuming a $100k salary with a a cost multiplier of 2 ($200k for 1 FTE), that amount of money could have paid for 77.5 FTEs over the 4 year duration of the Watson contract (62e6/200e3/4). I suspect that the overall scientific contribution of those researchers would have been higher.

SapporoChris 4y ago

I had forgotten about Watson. I don't normally watch Jeopardy. However, maybe I'm not part of the general public. I did some fast checking, my numbers may be off, but it looks like Jeopardy has a viewership of around 11 million perhaps it was higher in 2011. Now news reports would have spread the word further, but that's a small percentage of the general public of the USA.

HarHarVeryFunny 4y ago

Sure, Watson+Jeopardy was good PR for IBM, as was DeepBlue, but even if the definition of success (vs disaster) is only PR-success, I'm not sure how lasting that is/was for IBM. Certainly from a technical POV Watson was just marketing hype - a common label applied to a grab-bag of unrelated unremarkable products. If you polled people on the street today about which companies they associate with AI, I doubt IBM would come out anywhere near the top. In fact, I'm not sure if you surveyed the under-20 crowd they could even tell you what IBM does, assuming they've even heard of them, other than perhaps being in the computer business in some vague way.

kxyvr 4y ago

It wasn't an expensive disaster for IBM, but it was for MD Anderson Cancer Center, which spent $62 million on a project using Watson that didn't work: https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/876070 https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/876070 Certainly, not all projects work and institutions need to take risk. However, there is a big financial and opportunity cost to this. Rather than spending $62 million on Watson, and assuming a $100k salary with a a cost multiplier of 2 ($200k for 1 FTE), that amount of money could have paid for 77.5 FTEs over the 4 year duration of the Watson contract (62e6/200e3/4). I suspect that the overall scientific contribution of those researchers would have been higher.