IBM is not doing "cognitive computing" with Watson (2016) • Hacker News Board

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

#251

Post by nojvek » Mon, Apr 30, 2018, 7:20 PM UTC

itp wrote: post #209

What is the point of changing the headline of an article like this? The headline was an accurate summary of the contents ("THE FRAUDULENT CLAIMS MADE BY IBM ABOUT WATSON AND AI"). Maybe you agree, maybe you don't. But the current headline is just wrong. From the article: > I will say it clearly: Watson is a fraud. I am not saying that it can’t crunch words, and there may well be value in that to some people. But the…

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 comprehension.

The reality is people will say whatever to make a sale / get VC funding.

The current economy is running on greed. When the bubble bursts, people will get hurt. Then the economy runs on fear. Fear that AI is hype.

IBM has always been about hype. They are riding on the jeopardy wave and exploiting the greed.

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

#252

Post by jiveturkey » Mon, Apr 30, 2018, 7:20 PM UTC

danpalmer wrote: post #136

jiveturkey wrote: post #134

> I started a company called Cognitive Systems in 1981. Ahh. So just from the article, his gripe is of the “begs the question” sort — he’s not pleased with the evolution of idiom. Since he was doing “real AI” back then, who are these frauds to claim they are doing AI? His point may or may not be valid, but his specific argument is quite weak. He notes that even a person , an actual intelligence, wouldn’t know what Dy…

He specifically addresses that he _wasn’t_ doing “real AI” then, and given they’re doing fundamentally the same or similar things, IBM aren’t now either.

Yes, that is my point (sorry that I mis-stated it a bit). He is offended by the claims of these charlatans when he knows the technology hasn't advanced to the point of being AI. How dare they claim otherwise.

Also, he knows that they know it's a lie. Unforgivable.

But he's fixated on the literal (once-true) meaning of "AI". It doesn't mean that anymore, not to the lay person and not to the average technologist either.

Like "begs the question", one has to just get over it.

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

#253

Post by southern_cross » Mon, Apr 30, 2018, 7:24 PM UTC

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).

I'm not sure that things like Amazon's "Customers who bought this also bought that" is particularly amazing or clever; that ain't rocket surgery, you know! Sure, every once in a while I'll go "Yep, I probably need me some of that, too", but mostly it's "Nope - I've already got plenty of that, thank you. Moving on ..." And like everybody else, I too get sick of being pitched even more of this, or different variations of this, after I've already made my purchase. I'm sure that all of it does lead to at least an incremental increase in sales, though, so it serves its purpose.

A while back I saw an article on the success of an "A.I." that was being used for marketing purposes. And as I read through all of its supposed "breakthrough suggestions" I thought to myself "You know, you could have saved yourself an awful lot of time and trouble and money if you'd just read pretty much any sales and marketing book from, say, the last 100 years or so." Because there was really nothing there that wasn't already pretty much common knowledge within that realm.

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

#254

Post by falcor84 » Mon, Apr 30, 2018, 7:24 PM UTC

rescripting wrote: post #96

earenndil wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So...one person died? Do you know how many people die in normal, non-self-driving cars? It's never possible to get 100% accuracy.

I hand you a gun and say "you can point this gun at anyone, pull the trigger, and it wont harm them." You point the gun at a crowd, pull the trigger, it goes off and kills someone. Who do you blame? No one is saying guns, or cars, aren't dangerous. However this kind of false advertising leads people to use cars in dangerous ways while believing they are safe because they've been lied to. (Side note, there is some fin…

I, and the law would blame the person. They should have no particular reason to believe your claim and absolutely no reason to perform a potentially lethal experiment on people based on your claim.

You may be breaking the law as well, depending on the gun laws in your area, but as I understand it (IANAL) the manslaughter charge of entirely on the shooter.

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

#255

Post by nojvek » Mon, Apr 30, 2018, 7:28 PM UTC

Judgmentality wrote: post #44

albertgoeswoof wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

US advertising laws are very lax, just like data collection laws. You can getaway with saying a lot of shit in the name of advertising.

Deaths caused by Uber and Tesla hold little repercussions for them other than bad PR.

The US govt celebrates removing regulations which benefit its corporations at the cost of its citizens

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

#256

Post by AndrewKemendo » Mon, Apr 30, 2018, 7:30 PM UTC

kbenson wrote: post #211

ChuckMcM wrote: post #15

The 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…

> 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…

No, you're completely on the right track.

People usually judge AI systems based on superhuman performance criteria with almost no human baseline.

For example, both Google Translate and Facebook's translation system could reasonably be considered superhuman in performance because the singular systems can translate into dozens of languages immediately more accurately and better than any single human could. Unfortunately people compare these to a collection of the best translators in the world.

So you're exactly on track, that humans are heavily prejudiced against even simple mistakes that computers make, yet let consistent continuous mistakes slide for humans.

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

#257

Post by itp » Mon, Apr 30, 2018, 7:30 PM UTC

GuiA wrote: post #246

teach wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The HN submission guidelines include the following rule: "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait." The original headline is a bit sensational/clickbaity. That's a judgment call in this case, IMO, but I suspect that's why the title was changed.

I disagree, and do not believe the title is linkbaity/sensational at all, and find it problematic that the title was changed. It is an accurate description of the author’s position, which is that the claims made by IBM are fraudulent. Holding a position isn’t linkbaity or sensationalism. A linkbaity or sensational title would have been “you won’t believe what IBM claims”.

Exactly this. I've been uncomfortable with this trend for a while now, where everything gets labeled "clickbait" and there's a thread of resentment if an article does anything other than lay out dry facts as efficiently as possible.

The pendulum has swung too far. This wasn't clickbait, it was a fair and accurate summary of the full piece. Flag the entire post if you think it's inherently inflammatory, downvote, ban it if you're an admin, but this title had no business being edited.

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

#258

Post by Joeri » Mon, Apr 30, 2018, 7:31 PM UTC

landonxjames wrote: post #177

nilkn wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not even convinced Watson is a platform. My impression is that it's just a consulting division of the company that deploys teams to build solutions that are in some way related to AI, with each solution or implementation potentially being completely unique from the ground up. Perhaps someone from IBM can correct me though.

I'm currently sitting in a meeting about implementing the Watson Enterprise Search product in my company and that is more or less the impression I've gotten. They sell it as a platform that is easy to customize and then once you're in they bill you tons of hours to help you because the system is indecipherable and poorly documented.

They sell it as a platform that is easy to customize and then once you're in they bill you tons of hours to help you because the system is indecipherable and poorly documented.

So pretty much like any major enterprise system from the likes of IBM, SAP, Oracle, ...

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

#259

Post by a_imho » Mon, Apr 30, 2018, 7:32 PM UTC

landonxjames wrote: post #177

nilkn wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not even convinced Watson is a platform. My impression is that it's just a consulting division of the company that deploys teams to build solutions that are in some way related to AI, with each solution or implementation potentially being completely unique from the ground up. Perhaps someone from IBM can correct me though.

I'm currently sitting in a meeting about implementing the Watson Enterprise Search product in my company and that is more or less the impression I've gotten. They sell it as a platform that is easy to customize and then once you're in they bill you tons of hours to help you because the system is indecipherable and poorly documented.

Customer collaboration at its finest. Documentation checks out too.

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

#260

Post by itp » Mon, Apr 30, 2018, 7:32 PM UTC

teach wrote: post #239

itp wrote: post #209

What is the point of changing the headline of an article like this? The headline was an accurate summary of the contents ("THE FRAUDULENT CLAIMS MADE BY IBM ABOUT WATSON AND AI"). Maybe you agree, maybe you don't. But the current headline is just wrong. From the article: > I will say it clearly: Watson is a fraud. I am not saying that it can’t crunch words, and there may well be value in that to some people. But the…

The HN submission guidelines include the following rule: "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait." The original headline is a bit sensational/clickbaity. That's a judgment call in this case, IMO, but I suspect that's why the title was changed.

I'm sure you're right about the why, but I don't believe this was a judgement call, I believe it was wrong. The current headline is misleading (if the purpose of a headline is to provide information about the contents of the full post).

Questions about whether the entire article is misleading should be addressed via discussion in the comments or, if it's egregiously wrong, flagged/downvoted/removed.