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IBM is not doing "cognitive computing" with Watson (2016)
401–410 of 452 posts
Re: IBM is not doing "cognitive computing" with Watson (2016)
#402The day AI understands my dirty jokes, it's the day I call it cognitive.
Re: IBM is not doing "cognitive computing" with Watson (2016)
#403Earlier quoted context omitted.
You should the CEO’s of big companies bragging with big buzz words like “AI”, “cognitive”. The truth is very few people understand the current state of AI and it’s limits. Most of the fancy papers in Arxiv are based on NN’s which are just essentially vector algebraic math. Yes, we made huge leaps in image labeling and speech to text but current AI is a far cry from the full abilities of human brain reasoning and comp…
"just essentially vector algebraic math" -- True, but only in the sense that anything done by a computer is just iterated Boolean logic. Yet, Wikipedia and Grand Theft Auto and Mathematica have emergent properties beyond the obvious things that Boolean logic can do. So the fact that neural networks are based on vector algebra doesn't prove that they aren't capable of impressive things.
I mean to say the there are tons of problems NNs aren’t good for. If we are on the journey to discover GAI super algorithm that is smart enough to learn very quickly without a shit ton of data, I’d say we still have a long way to go.
Anyone claiming they solved cognitive reasoning with a bunch of NNs stacked together in a black box is probably lying to themselves.
Re: IBM is not doing "cognitive computing" with Watson (2016)
#404Isn't it more or less common knowledge now that Watson is all marketing buzz? The Watson that IBM is selling CIOs on is a very different thing from what was seen on Jeopardy.
Re: IBM is not doing "cognitive computing" with Watson (2016)
#405Dear 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.
Well, there's also the opportunity cost of capex leaked away from areas that it could be productively focused on, also the opex of running the new implementation. And the missed opportunity from building skills in implementing opensource alts - like Tensorflow, for example.
Since we're thinking like CTOs we need to account for risk, not cost. IBM sells Watson to companies with money, and for those clients the factors driving decisions are more often risk and liability. A CTO with budget who chooses to build in-house is taking a big risk. If IBM fails, they can cover their ass with a contract. If they fail in-house there is no such safety net. Easier to save face with the board.
Re: IBM is not doing "cognitive computing" with Watson (2016)
#406Dear 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.
True, it's well known that engineers don't often have appreciation for the emotionality of marketing. But there's a limit here. We can't just have no-holds-barred hyperbole and outright lying to the point of unfairly deceiving customers. Obviously it takes a legal professional to judge where that line falls, but for something as specialized as this it's hard for laypeople to appreciate the distinction between stretch…
Well, it might be argued that with the exception of this author (who apparently coined the terms they're using) neither the IBM marketers, nor any of the potential consumers understand what these words mean. It is pure abstraction to most people. If the marketers were pressed, I'd guess that they'd just define these terms differently than the people making claims of fraud.
I'm imagining the glossy eyes of a judge or jury trying to grasp the nuance and just throwing in the towel.
Re: IBM is not doing "cognitive computing" with Watson (2016)
#407Earlier quoted context omitted.
What's bad about it is that it leads to a "market for lemons" for anyone working in the A.I. field in either engineering or sales. People see so much bullshit that they come to the conclusion that it is all bullshit.
I think this is good. In a world that moves too quick to have review/ratings companies for everything, you should come in skeptical and be proven wrong. Its up to the merchant to make a great product, its up to you to compare and make good decisions.
Sure, but Watson isn’t really a product and IBM isn’t really a merchant here. There’s never going to be a Watson review anywhere because (AFAICT) Watson is just a marketing name for a wide range of technologies, none of which do any of the stuff shown in the TV commercials. That’s the problem.
I don’t even know who those ads are targeting. Anyone who knows anything at all about this stuff will be dismayed at the sheer BS of it all. Everyone else seeing the ads isn’t in a position to steer customers towards IBM for all their AI needs. They really need to kill the whole ad campaign, surely it’s doing IBM more harm than good.
Re: IBM is not doing "cognitive computing" with Watson (2016)
#408The 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…
> I believe that most people would understand that SpaceX wasn't already hosting people on Mars. You overestimate people's understanding of space. Many people thought "The Martian" was a true story like "Apollo 13".
How many is “many” though? I’m assuming slightly more than thought Star Wars was real, and slightly fewer than think Iron Man was real. That’s not ignorance, that’s mental illness.
Re: IBM is not doing "cognitive computing" with Watson (2016)
#409Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Unfortunately many, many people think that talking to your computer in actually already possible, they just haven't experienced it yet. Given how often another person can't correctly infer meaning when people talk, I doubt it will ever be how people imagine it. Initially, I imagine it will be a lot of people trying to talk normally and a lot of AI responses asking how your poorly worded worded request should be car…
In a previous job I looked into the viability of pen computing, specifically which companies had succeeded commercially with a pen-based interface. A lot of folks are too young to know this, but there was a time when it was accepted wisdom that much of personal computing would eventually converge to a pen-based interface, with the primary enabling technology being handwriting recognition. What I found is that compute…
The first generation Newton was insanely good at recognizing really terrible cursive handwriting and terrible at recognizing tidy or printed handwriting. The second generation Newton was very good at recognizing tidy handwriting (and you could switch back to the old system if you were one of the freaks whose handwriting the old system grokked). The Newton also had really nice correction system, e.g. gestures for changing the case of a single character or word. In my opinion the later Newton generations recognized handwriting as well as you could expect, when it failed you forgave it and could easily correct the errors, and was decently fast on the 192MHz ARM CPUs.
Speech is way, way harder.
Re: IBM is not doing "cognitive computing" with Watson (2016)
#410Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, there's also the opportunity cost of capex leaked away from areas that it could be productively focused on, also the opex of running the new implementation. And the missed opportunity from building skills in implementing opensource alts - like Tensorflow, for example.
Since we're thinking like CTOs we need to account for risk, not cost. IBM sells Watson to companies with money, and for those clients the factors driving decisions are more often risk and liability. A CTO with budget who chooses to build in-house is taking a big risk. If IBM fails, they can cover their ass with a contract. If they fail in-house there is no such safety net. Easier to save face with the board.
In other words, nobody ever got fired for buying IBM