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Watson was supposed to be that OpenAI, much bigger too* Given that they had almost a decade head start, many thousands of programmers and a massive hype machine

Watson was supposed to be that OpenAI, much bigger too* Given that they had almost a decade head start, many thousands of programmers and a massive hype machine, and managed to fail completely, it's safe to say that whatever AI insights come from that company can be safely discarded as either wrong or unoriginal. * Source: I was there and internal kool-aid was strong. Almost like Metaverse at Facebook, I would imagine.

drumhead 3y ago
Were they barking up the wrong tree with Watson? They just seemed to give up while Google and Open AI just carried on going. Maybe it was their shortsighted decision to curtail basic research because it wasn't generating a return?
- twelve40 3y ago
  I'm not a business analyst but my amateur impression was that it was a project that was commandeered by delusional MBA types who didn't have the least clue about the actual technology and were feeding off each other's hype. Instead of wow'ing the world with the actual results they focused on releasing lots of shiny futuristic marketing material which their actual technology hasn't kept up with for whatever reason.
ec109685 3y ago
The difference is Watson was garbage from the beginning. Literally no “wow” moments (jeopardy where they typed in the questions for it slightly interesting). Nothing was generally applicable.
dpflan 3y ago
Well. They should try again, right? - Hugging Face and IBM partner on watsonx.ai, next-gen enterprise studio for AI builders - https://huggingface.co/blog/huggingface-and-ibm https://huggingface.co/blog/huggingface-and-ibm
- twelve40 3y ago
  Maybe. Until they hire/acquihire a whole layer of different people, the IBM part of this will probably end up with a similar fate. Basically, people who I've worked with were either real geeks who just want to experiment with their ideas/patents and be left alone until retirement (not too much say in anything until things start crashing), followed by great middle folks who stick around for a couple of years then leave for startups and faangs, then the business careerists whose only priority was to suck up to the boss and compete for internal funding by producing powerpoints. Great turnarounds are possible, as Microsoft has shown, but I wouldn't hold my breath in this case.

drumhead 3y ago

Were they barking up the wrong tree with Watson? They just seemed to give up while Google and Open AI just carried on going. Maybe it was their shortsighted decision to curtail basic research because it wasn't generating a return?

twelve40 3y ago
I'm not a business analyst but my amateur impression was that it was a project that was commandeered by delusional MBA types who didn't have the least clue about the actual technology and were feeding off each other's hype. Instead of wow'ing the world with the actual results they focused on releasing lots of shiny futuristic marketing material which their actual technology hasn't kept up with for whatever reason.

ec109685 3y ago

The difference is Watson was garbage from the beginning. Literally no “wow” moments (jeopardy where they typed in the questions for it slightly interesting). Nothing was generally applicable.

dpflan 3y ago

Well. They should try again, right? - Hugging Face and IBM partner on watsonx.ai, next-gen enterprise studio for AI builders - https://huggingface.co/blog/huggingface-and-ibm https://huggingface.co/blog/huggingface-and-ibm

twelve40 3y ago
Maybe. Until they hire/acquihire a whole layer of different people, the IBM part of this will probably end up with a similar fate. Basically, people who I've worked with were either real geeks who just want to experiment with their ideas/patents and be left alone until retirement (not too much say in anything until things start crashing), followed by great middle folks who stick around for a couple of years then leave for startups and faangs, then the business careerists whose only priority was to suck up to the boss and compete for internal funding by producing powerpoints. Great turnarounds are possible, as Microsoft has shown, but I wouldn't hold my breath in this case.