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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)

#31

Post by JBReefer »

xevb3k wrote: post #16
EastLondonCoder wrote: post #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.

What are the big successes? Speech recognition? Which still seems rather bad to me. Language translation (which for the languages I’m interested in (Japanese) is still almost totally unusable? Self driving cars? Which are not yet in production (and where the social issues are probably far harder than the technical ones, and likely have been since the 90s). Is there some big application if ML that I’m missing that is…

I work on Amelia at IPSoft, things seem to be going well.

Customer Service is a huge, overlooked industry mostly based around classifying requests and then performing a rote action, which is a great use case for AI.

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

#32

Post by fixermark »

xevb3k wrote: post #16
EastLondonCoder wrote: post #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.

What are the big successes? Speech recognition? Which still seems rather bad to me. Language translation (which for the languages I’m interested in (Japanese) is still almost totally unusable? Self driving cars? Which are not yet in production (and where the social issues are probably far harder than the technical ones, and likely have been since the 90s). Is there some big application if ML that I’m missing that is…

Amazon's system for finding related products is eerily accurate. The more you buy, the better it gets at anticipating what you want to buy.

... but the larger wins they've had are behind the scenes, in the predictive modeling that helps them get product into warehouses in front of demand spikes (and into geographically-relevant warehouses to satisfy the spikes).

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

#33

Post by solarkraft »

jcrotor wrote: post #6
Dryken wrote: 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.

When I hear AI I usually imagine deep learning, but many companies using the term don't specify.

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

#34

Post by baxtr »

cryptoz wrote: post #18
baxtr wrote: post #9

AI is definitely starting to enter the “through of disillusionment” in its hype cycle.

Is it really? I don't see that at all. Rather I see AI as finally being entrenched in normal, everyday products and services. AI is here to stay and the hype hasn't even started yet, at least not compared to what's coming. Billions of people own devices that they can talk to, that can talk back, that can translate between more languages than humans can, that know facts about you that you didn't even know yourself, et…

Yeah, I guess you’re right, too :-) It’s definitely true for ML. However, I was mainly thinking about the overhyped “AI can do anything” sort of nonsense that is mostly spread by people who don’t have any clue about CS

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

#36

Post by chomp »

Yep, matches my experience. We invited IBM to our company to pitch Watson, there was very little that was impressive about it. "Watson" is mostly just a coding services integration team, who will assign a team to add some basic NLP to your web services. Someone with a free weekend and a book on TensorFlow or NLTK can replicate most of what the IBM sales engineers pitch for Watson.

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

#38

Post by glup »

Dan Klein shared in a graduate NLP class at Berkeley a few years back a AAAI article on Watson back in 2010 (when it actually was a distinct technology stack and not just marketing nonsense). At that time IBM was focused on question answering in Jeopardy. It was pretty clearly incremental rather than novel— Dan used the example to show that 1) ensemble techniques can be effective if done properly and 2) hyper parameters matter, a lot 3) there's human intelligence and then there's Ken Jennings intelligence: looking at precision and percent answered, he's in his own separate league. It made me think a lot about individual differences in terms of declarative knowledge.

https://www.aaai.org/Magazine/Watson/watson.php

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

#39

Post by Analemma_ »

fixermark wrote: post #32
xevb3k wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are the big successes? Speech recognition? Which still seems rather bad to me. Language translation (which for the languages I’m interested in (Japanese) is still almost totally unusable? Self driving cars? Which are not yet in production (and where the social issues are probably far harder than the technical ones, and likely have been since the 90s). Is there some big application if ML that I’m missing that is…

Amazon's system for finding related products is eerily accurate. The more you buy, the better it gets at anticipating what you want to buy. ... but the larger wins they've had are behind the scenes, in the predictive modeling that helps them get product into warehouses in front of demand spikes (and into geographically-relevant warehouses to satisfy the spikes).

> Amazon's system for finding related products is eerily accurate.

Amazon's system for finding related products fucking sucks. After I buy an X, I see ads for more X for months, which is completely useless. Sometimes I'll see ads for the exact thing I bought... what?!

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

#40

Post by goatlover »

flamtap wrote: post #3
Dryken wrote: 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".

However, if a robot from scifi were to walk out of the lab, like Data or Ava from Ex Machina, or we had access to HAL or Samantha from Her, we wouldn't just give it a specific technical name. We would consider those to be genuine AIs, in that they exhibit human-level cognitive abilities in the generalized sense.

It's true that in Her, Samantha was just an OS at the start, kind of like how the holographic doctor was just a hologram at the beginning of Voyager, but as both stories progress, it becomes clear they are more than that. By the end of Her, Samntha and the other OSes have clearly surpassed human intelligence.

Those are fictional examples, but they illustrate what we would consider to be genuine artificial intelligence and not just NLP or ML. The reason people always downplay current AI is because it's always limited and narrow, and not on the level of human general intelligence, like fictional AIs are.

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