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

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

#271

Post by psyc » Mon, Apr 30, 2018, 7:45 PM UTC

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #256

kbenson wrote: post #211

Earlier 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…

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. Unfortunatel…

I might use this in future critical discussions of AI. “It’s not really intelligent.” Yeah, well, neither am I. On a more serious note, it seems obvious to me that technology is incremental, and we are where we are. Given 20 more years of peacetime, we’ll be further along. When VGA 320x200x256 arrived it was dubbed photorealistic. I wonder what HN would have had to say about that.

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

#272

Post by rdiddly » Mon, Apr 30, 2018, 7:45 PM UTC

nojvek wrote: post #251

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 comp…

You can also argue that even the leaps we've managed to make in machine learning (a phrase I prefer over 'AI' not least because it includes the reminder-word 'machine') are mostly quantitative rather than qualitative leaps. Almost anything you can think of that's 'better' lately seems to be mostly thanks to 'more' -- more data collected in one place available for training/processing (thanks to large centralized surveillance companies), and the ability to process more data faster (thanks to faster hardware, and more of it, owned by those selfsame large centralized surveillance companies). We've seen a lot of optimizations and interesting research within the existing paradigm but we haven't seen a serious qualitative breakthrough the likes of which would justify this kind of hype.

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

#273

Post by rustybelt » Mon, Apr 30, 2018, 7:47 PM UTC

samfriedman wrote: post #50

OT 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".

Thank you. I don't know much about AI, but I like to think I know a little about Bob Dylan. The bittersweet love song is a Bob Dylan staple that lasted well beyond his protest phase. I think Watson actually a pretty good job of identifying it as a theme. From "Girl from North Country" to "Don't Think Twice, It's Alright" to "It Aint Me Babe" to "Tangled Up in Blue" to all the way into the 90's with "Make You Feel My Love", it's a theme that spans his entire body of work.

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

#274

Post by bialpio » Mon, Apr 30, 2018, 7:47 PM UTC

AsyncAwait wrote: post #210

Filligree wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is not a distinction most people understand.

And how do you know that the present hardware is enough to deliver full self-driving capability? I don't think anyone knows what precise hardware is required at this point as it wasn't achieved yet. So, do you think it may be possible that people do understand the distinction and are STILL not convinced?

Well, humans have 2 cameras that they are able to rotate & a brain and that seems to be sufficient for them to drive in terms of hardware... :-)

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

#275

Post by PaulHoule » Mon, Apr 30, 2018, 7:48 PM UTC

CharlesW wrote: post #243

optimuspaul wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it's bad because it drives down the potential market value for good products that could become available in the market because the market expects that all AI is inferior to expectations.

Temporarily. Once past (and possibly during) the "Trough of Disillusionment"[1], products that really do solve problems that people are willing to pay to have solved will do very well. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hype_cycle

IBM can bullshit it's way through a coming "AI Winter"; startups might not be able to.

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

#276

Post by wizardhat » Mon, Apr 30, 2018, 7:50 PM UTC

I do agree that Watson seems oversold, but the evidence in this article (Watson's shallow opinion of Bob Dylan, compared to the author's opinion of Bob Dylan) seems kind of weak. I was hoping for some insider information on the implementation of Watson, but unfortunately there is none.

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

#277

Post by dang » Mon, Apr 30, 2018, 7:54 PM UTC

Discussed at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11751267.

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

#278

Post by snowwrestler » Mon, Apr 30, 2018, 7:57 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…

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 computer handwriting recognition can never ever be good enough to satisfy people's expectations. Why? Because no one is good enough to satisfy most people's expectations for handwriting recognition, including other humans, and often even including themselves!

Frustration with reading handwriting is a given in human interaction. It will be a given in computer interaction too--only, people don't feel like they need to be polite to a computer. So they freely get mad about it.

The companies that had succeeded with pen computing were those that had figured out a way to work around interpreting natural handwriting.

One category was companies who are specialized in pen computing as an art interface--Wacom being the primary example at the time. No attempt at handwriting recognition at all.

The other was companies who had tricked people into learning a new kind of handwriting. The primary example is the Palm Pilot's "Graffiti" system of characters. The neat thing about Graffiti is it reversed customer expectations. Because it was a new way of writing, when recognition failed, customers often blamed themselves for not doing it right!

We all know what happened instead of pens: touchscreen keyboards. The pen interface continues to be a niche UI, focused more on art than text.

It's interesting to see the parallels with spoken word interfaces. I don't know what the answer is. I doubt many people would have predicted in 2001 that the answer to pen computing was a touchscreen keyboard without tactile keys. Heck people laughed about it in 2007 when the iPhone came out.

But I won't be surprised if the eventual product that "solves" talking to a computer, wins because it hacks its way around customer expectations in a novel way--rather than delivering a "perfect" voice interface.

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

#279

Post by mjevans » Mon, Apr 30, 2018, 8:02 PM UTC

ChuckMcM wrote: post #235

kbenson wrote: post #211

Earlier 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…

I think you have a good point. Something that was fascinating for me was that one of the things the search engine did after being acquired by IBM was looking at search queries for common questions people would ask a search engine. Taking 5 years of search engine query strings (no PII[1]) and turning them into a 'question' that someone might ask. What was interesting is that it was clear that search engines have train…

Humans are really good at handling 'fuzzy' input. Something that is supposed to have meaning, and should if everything were heard perfectly, but which has some of the context garbled or wrong.

At least, assuming they have the proper context. Humans mostly fill in the blanks based on what they /expect/ to hear.

Maybe someday we'll get to a point where a device we classify as a 'computer' hosts something we would classify as an 'intelligent life form'; irrespective of origin. Something that isn't an analog organic processor inside of a 'bag of mostly salty water'. At that point persistent awareness and context(s) might provide that life form with a human-like meaning to exchanges with humans.

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

#280

Post by emodendroket » Mon, Apr 30, 2018, 8:04 PM UTC

snowwrestler wrote: post #278

kbenson wrote: post #211

Earlier 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…

I got a two-in-one Windows notebook and I was really, really impressed with the handwriting recognition. It can even read my cursive with like 95% accuracy, which I never imagined. That said, it's still slower than typing.