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IBM is not doing "cognitive computing" with Watson (2016)

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Re: IBM is not doing "cognitive computing" with Watson (2016)

#3
post #2

Anyway none of the company that pretend doing AI are actually doing AI. AI nowadays is pure branding bullshit.

I heard someone say that A.I. is just what we call technology that doesn't work yet. Once it works, we give it a specific name, like "natural speech recognition".

Re: IBM is not doing "cognitive computing" with Watson (2016)

#4
"Machine learning" was a pretty good buzz word, but "Artificial Intelligence" is even better. And in a way, ML is part of AI so it isn't really lying.

IBM tries to sell into c-suites of companies that are less technically-adept than the average HN reader. Their marketing seems to be pretty effective, at least in getting proof of concept projects signed with big names.

Watson is simply IBM's ML product, but they call it AI and wrap it in marketing for all the reasons every AI startup does the same thing.

Re: IBM is not doing "cognitive computing" with Watson (2016)

#5
post #3
post #2

Anyway none of the company that pretend doing AI are actually doing AI. AI nowadays is pure branding bullshit.

I heard someone say that A.I. is just what we call technology that doesn't work yet. Once it works, we give it a specific name, like "natural speech recognition".

I like that definition too (I know it from Seth Godin). It’s honest, in the sense that we just don’t know yet how to that stuff instead of labeling every single code of line as AI.

Re: IBM is not doing "cognitive computing" with Watson (2016)

#6
post #2

Anyway none of the company that pretend doing AI are actually doing AI. AI nowadays is pure branding bullshit.

Not sure what you mean by that. Is there some industry standard around the term "Artificial Intelligence"? I agree that its become a bit of a buzzword, but I'm not sure that its being misused.

Re: IBM is not doing "cognitive computing" with Watson (2016)

#7
The way IBM talks about it is completely bs. However, this round of AI is definitely better than the last one. Specifically, whats different this time around is that previously, expert based systems and many machine learning techniques require that you specifically hand code things like:

1. Parsing and providing the input dataset into 'features'

2. Hand coding the logic and rules for many different cases (Expert systems)

Now, it has become easier to train a model such as a neural net where you can provide much 'rawer' data; similarly you just provide it a 'goal' in the form of a loss function which it tries to optimize over the dataset.

By 'true' AI, I think most people mean 'how a human learns' - which is actually a very biased thing, since we humans have goals of things like the need to survive, etc. I do believe it would be possible to encode these into goals, although doing that properly and more generically seems a little bit in the future.

Re: IBM is not doing "cognitive computing" with Watson (2016)

#8
It’s an unusually beautiful written article, well worth the read just for the prose. As for the main sentiment that we have a new AI winter, I’m not so sure. My lay person view is that we see quite a lot of commercial success with these systems so the current wave will be well funded for at least a decade.

Re: IBM is not doing "cognitive computing" with Watson (2016)

#10
post #7

The way IBM talks about it is completely bs. However, this round of AI is definitely better than the last one. Specifically, whats different this time around is that previously, expert based systems and many machine learning techniques require that you specifically hand code things like: 1. Parsing and providing the input dataset into 'features' 2. Hand coding the logic and rules for many different cases (Expert syst…

Feature design is still the prevailing part of machine learning though.
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