6 ms·

Watson had a ton of promise. I feel like IBM was desperate for revenue and to reinvent itself as a younger more innovative startup-type so the marketing and sal

by jarym 3y ago

Watson had a ton of promise. I feel like IBM was desperate for revenue and to reinvent itself as a younger more innovative startup-type so the marketing and sales people took over what was VERY clearly an immature technology and tried to sell it everywhere. They were good at that, but then the tech didn't meet the lofty expectations that had been created. ChatGPT is entirely different - people understand instantly how useful it is and don't need marketing and sales people to peddle it.

eropple 3y ago
Part of it (and I was briefly at IBM after the Watson craze so I heard some complaining) was also that they'd rebranded a lot of other things as Watson to try to cash in on it.
- smashed 3y ago
  IBM tried to sell the company I worked at Watson Weather or something, following their acquisition of The Weather Network I believe. Everything was Watson something. It was such evident bullshit. They convinced executives to do a pilot. It was a shit-show. Quick and dirty API endpoints running on bluemix and spewing 500 internal errors at every gust of wind. Nothing remotely intelligent.
  - eropple 3y ago
    I was pretty glad I didn't have to deal with Bluemix. Instead I was told we'd be using AWS, had that change after I started, waited four months for a vSphere setup to be rolled out for me, and quit two weeks later.
Retric 3y ago
ChatGPT is useful, but I’ve seen people get more wary about using it over time. It’s very good at making stuff that looks correct without being correct. That’s fine for a school assignment, but people hate looking dumb by having silly things slip through.
- brookst 3y ago
  The hallucination meme has far exceeded the reality, at least for GPT4. That said, it would be insane to use it at work to generate content in a domain you're not an expert in. It is an amazing productivity tool, but it does not change the reality that faking expertise at work is always going to bite you.
  - 2devnull 3y ago
    A screwdriver is really dangerous. If you stick it into your eye you’ll go blind. It would be insane to do that. Such risks are probably not things that we as a society should let prevent us from having screwdrivers. Ditto for gpt.
- broast 3y ago
  Rather than copying its output for publishing, I assume most people are using it to have conversations with, and ask questions, probe the answers, discover new information, research or use that information, and follow up with the conversation over time. That's how I use it and it's now my first step before Google, for certain types of questions or thoughts. I don't see that utility really going away.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - Retric 3y ago
    Sure, but that’s a long way from the initial hype which is my point. I simply don’t recall anything else where most people’s opinions spiked then fell so rapidly before.
kitd 3y ago
It's also available for free, anathema to IBM.
belter 3y ago
Nothing will matter if it's not profitable. And that is still an unknown as OpenAI must be losing money on it. "The dirty secret of artificial intelligence" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35832168 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35832168
- moffkalast 3y ago
  There are lots of people paying for Plus by now, even more using the API. With their prices as relatively steep as they are they should be rolling in income by now. As long as Microsoft keeps throwing money at them it's irrelevant anyway.
- hirako2000 3y ago
  They clearly must be. It raised over $11B so far. If we follow the money, the valuation, on either low or high end is absurd. It's starting to seem like weWork at a larger scale. Revenue for 2022? $3M No trace of financials for 2023, other than some expected 100M or 1B depending on the wind for this year. we can be sure of one thing, when numbers can be used to boost interest and claim a success, we get numbers release faster than accounting even settled. My guess is that they are burning at least hundreds of millions by poaching the best AI talent from Google. Infrastructure wise, about the same. And no, it doesn't help the bottom line to be owned by a massive cloud provider, it only distracts since there is a senior VP somewhere in there now who's non negotiable OKR is complete migration to MS Azure. But openAI will still be charged like any other client. Welcome to vampirizing VC at its best. Put billion in to inflat the bubble, if it wins great, if it doesn't then you would have sold plenty as a prefered must have no choice parter for services, and by then insider info would have given you a head start to sell of a good chunk of your bags anyway. OpenAI may win the prize for the most hyped business and fastest skyrocketing company in the entire history, it risks to not even explode but worse: to disappear in the deep sky with backers pulling their hair off or each others when they finally get to receive the in and out reports. Everyone else will have moved on, subscribing to a plethora of dedicated services built by tiny companies improving on moderate size models and building catered solutions. It will be a great happy ending after all the spams we've seen everywhere over the internet about this gpt genius tech.

by jarym 3y ago

eropple 3y ago

Part of it (and I was briefly at IBM after the Watson craze so I heard some complaining) was also that they'd rebranded a lot of other things as Watson to try to cash in on it.

smashed 3y ago
IBM tried to sell the company I worked at Watson Weather or something, following their acquisition of The Weather Network I believe. Everything was Watson something. It was such evident bullshit. They convinced executives to do a pilot. It was a shit-show. Quick and dirty API endpoints running on bluemix and spewing 500 internal errors at every gust of wind. Nothing remotely intelligent.
- eropple 3y ago
  I was pretty glad I didn't have to deal with Bluemix. Instead I was told we'd be using AWS, had that change after I started, waited four months for a vSphere setup to be rolled out for me, and quit two weeks later.

Retric 3y ago

ChatGPT is useful, but I’ve seen people get more wary about using it over time. It’s very good at making stuff that looks correct without being correct. That’s fine for a school assignment, but people hate looking dumb by having silly things slip through.

brookst 3y ago
The hallucination meme has far exceeded the reality, at least for GPT4. That said, it would be insane to use it at work to generate content in a domain you're not an expert in. It is an amazing productivity tool, but it does not change the reality that faking expertise at work is always going to bite you.
- 2devnull 3y ago
  A screwdriver is really dangerous. If you stick it into your eye you’ll go blind. It would be insane to do that. Such risks are probably not things that we as a society should let prevent us from having screwdrivers. Ditto for gpt.
broast 3y ago
Rather than copying its output for publishing, I assume most people are using it to have conversations with, and ask questions, probe the answers, discover new information, research or use that information, and follow up with the conversation over time. That's how I use it and it's now my first step before Google, for certain types of questions or thoughts. I don't see that utility really going away.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- Retric 3y ago
  Sure, but that’s a long way from the initial hype which is my point. I simply don’t recall anything else where most people’s opinions spiked then fell so rapidly before.

kitd 3y ago

It's also available for free, anathema to IBM.

belter 3y ago

Nothing will matter if it's not profitable. And that is still an unknown as OpenAI must be losing money on it. "The dirty secret of artificial intelligence" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35832168 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35832168

moffkalast 3y ago
There are lots of people paying for Plus by now, even more using the API. With their prices as relatively steep as they are they should be rolling in income by now. As long as Microsoft keeps throwing money at them it's irrelevant anyway.
hirako2000 3y ago
They clearly must be. It raised over $11B so far. If we follow the money, the valuation, on either low or high end is absurd. It's starting to seem like weWork at a larger scale. Revenue for 2022? $3M No trace of financials for 2023, other than some expected 100M or 1B depending on the wind for this year. we can be sure of one thing, when numbers can be used to boost interest and claim a success, we get numbers release faster than accounting even settled. My guess is that they are burning at least hundreds of millions by poaching the best AI talent from Google. Infrastructure wise, about the same. And no, it doesn't help the bottom line to be owned by a massive cloud provider, it only distracts since there is a senior VP somewhere in there now who's non negotiable OKR is complete migration to MS Azure. But openAI will still be charged like any other client. Welcome to vampirizing VC at its best. Put billion in to inflat the bubble, if it wins great, if it doesn't then you would have sold plenty as a prefered must have no choice parter for services, and by then insider info would have given you a head start to sell of a good chunk of your bags anyway. OpenAI may win the prize for the most hyped business and fastest skyrocketing company in the entire history, it risks to not even explode but worse: to disappear in the deep sky with backers pulling their hair off or each others when they finally get to receive the in and out reports. Everyone else will have moved on, subscribing to a plethora of dedicated services built by tiny companies improving on moderate size models and building catered solutions. It will be a great happy ending after all the spams we've seen everywhere over the internet about this gpt genius tech.