Dear engineers, merit is useless when you're trying to sell something. Authority is king, and people remember emotion and hyperbole. Marketing and sales is almost always about representing authority regardless of merit. The only thing that matters after a Watson sale is if Watson can help solve the problems the customers have.
IBM is not doing "cognitive computing" with Watson (2016)
41–50 of 452 posts
Re: IBM is not doing "cognitive computing" with Watson (2016)
#42Question: how can the author know what Watson really is doing unless the author worked on Watson?
If you're going to try and explain the above to me, don't do it by explaining what Watson "really" is doing (unless you worked on Watson yourself). Explain exactly how you can tell the difference from the outside.
As far as I can tell all the author did was point out that Watson made a mistake (saying that Dylan's songs is about love fading) and this is not enough, since humans make mistakes too.
Re: IBM is not doing "cognitive computing" with Watson (2016)
#43It’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…
> Self driving cars? Which are not yet in production
Yes they are. What do you mean, not in production? Maybe there aren't millions of fully autonomous cars on the road today, but there will be soon. They sure are in production. Companies like Tesla are making production hardware self-driving cars right now - full autonomy coming soon, of course.
> Speech recognition? Which still seems rather bad to me.
Speech recognition is 100% amazing. The phones never ever hear me wrong any more, not ever, not once. The main problem I have with it is interpretation, which can be shocking, shocking bad. (Ask Google for a joke, it'll tell you one and then prompt to you ask "one more". As soon as you do, it'll say "one more what? I don't understand", which is pretty funny.)
> Is there some big application if ML that I’m missing that is a clear win?
Well yeah. I would say millions. ML has been embedded into the world now and makes nearly every daily interaction with technology better than it was before.
Re: IBM is not doing "cognitive computing" with Watson (2016)
#44The author's particular gripe is that the Watson advertisements showing someone sitting down and talking to "Watson." They bother me as well (and did so when I was working at IBM in the Watson group) because they portray a capability that nothing in IBM can provide. Nobody can provide it (again to the author's point) because dialog systems (those which interact with a user through conversational speech) don't exist o…
Kinda how Tesla advertises autopilot as a self driving car that's safer than human drivers? > Full Self-Driving Hardware on All Cars > All Tesla vehicles produced in our factory, including Model 3, have the hardware needed for full self-driving capability at a safety level substantially greater than that of a human driver. https://www.tesla.com/autopilot/
Am I extreme in feeling someone should go to jail for that? It was bad enough when they were originally advertising it, but now that they're defending it even after people died...ugh.
https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/28/17172178/tesla-model-x-cr...
Re: IBM is not doing "cognitive computing" with Watson (2016)
#45"This was about promoting expert systems. Where are they now?" In 2017, Intuit, Inc., owners of Quicken, posted revenue of about $5 billion. Not too shabby.
Heh. Of course that’s a space with a pretty constrained and well defined set of rules. Until they aren’t of course. Which is why we still have accountants.
Re: IBM is not doing "cognitive computing" with Watson (2016)
#46It’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…
ML is the new A/B testing
Re: IBM is not doing "cognitive computing" with Watson (2016)
#47It’s not just sleazy advertising, the money IBM has taken from cancer research for snake oil is downright fraud in my book
Re: IBM is not doing "cognitive computing" with Watson (2016)
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?!
Yep, I see this all the time too. Buy a printer? Amazon thinks you want to buy a new printer every day for months.
Google too. I bought a Pixel 2 online, from Google, signed in to Google. Now I see ads on Google ad networks all day long to buy a Pixel 2. It has been 5 months of daily ads from Google to buy the phone I just bought. Ridiculous.
Ad networks are a clear financial win for AI - but they also show the ridiculousness and are clear windows into the failures so far.
Re: IBM is not doing "cognitive computing" with Watson (2016)
#49Watson is the IBM marketing department going mad about ways in which IBM can continue to remain relevant in a world that increasingly doesn't care about what hardware a particular computer program runs on. If there is going to be a 'second AI winter' I fully expect Watson and other such efforts to be the cause.
For AI and deep learning, hardware does matter. Specialized machines much more efficient than general purpose CPUs
Re: IBM is not doing "cognitive computing" with Watson (2016)
#50OT from the headline, but I take issue with the author's claim that Bob Dylan's work doesn't relate to the theme "love fades". Dylan has had a vast career beyond his protest song days, and I'd argue that one of his best albums, "Blood on the Tracks" would be accurately summed up as "love fades".