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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)

#281

Post by emodendroket »

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…

>One of the bits that Jimmy Fallon does on the Tonight Show is an interviewer who asks people a question but uses nonsense words that sound "right" in the question.

There was a similar thing going around the Japanese Web a few years ago, where you'd try to sneak in soundalikes into conversation without anybody noticing, but the example I remember vividly was replacing "irasshaimase!" ("welcome!") with "ikakusaimase!" ("it stinks of squid!").

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

#282

Post by jonjojr »

I would only refer to Episode 4-5 of Silicon Valley in Season 5.

This will be the mistake we will make when we introduce a technology we think it is smart enough to make decision for us and turns out all it does is read words faster than us and interpret them literally.

Even with the closing statement of "AI winter is coming soon." I can see Watson having a problem understanding that statement even with context.

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

#283

Post by xamuel »

randcraw wrote: post #268
jpttsn wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree; OP is one of those articles, that start to make a reasonable point only to frame it with a highly debatable specific example.

Dylan didn't win the Nobel for his songs about faded love, and he won't be remembered for them especially. Schank is 72 years old. He came to know Dylan when when his protest lyrics gave voice to 20-somethings like Schank in the 60's. Like the rest of us, Schank likely remembers Dylan less for his retrospective years thereafter.

What you've called Dylan's "retrospective" years include an earth-shattering comeback with three top-charting albums in a row starting with 1997's "Time Out Of Mind" (which, incidentally, has quite a few 'love fades' lyrics). Dylan himself has singled out "Time Out Of Mind" as the only one of his own records that he himself goes back and listens to.

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

#284

Post by Xavdidtheshadow »

laichzeit0 wrote: post #121

The most ingenious trick that the IBM marketing department pulled was to get non-technical (and probably even technical people, judging by this thread) to think that Watson is some kind of singular thing. Like that it’s a single big neural network with different APIs on it, or something. I honestly think that’s what most people think Watson refers to. Watson is like Google Cloud Platform. It’s just a name for a platf…

Totally. Especially because it was on Jeopardy, further reinforcing the idea that it is a single box. Maybe it was then, but that's definitely an impression that's stuck with me since.

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

#285

Post by rossdavidh »

jacquesm wrote: post #20

Watson 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.

Here I am doing a reasonably good impression of Watson, by totally missing your point and just adding that we have already had (at least) two AI winters, this would be (at least) the third coming up, if it does.

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

#286

Post by AndrewKemendo »

psyc wrote: post #271
AndrewKemendo wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, that's almost exactly how I start most of these conversations: "Do you know how BAD we are at most things?"

Venkatesh Rao had a great piece on how mediocre we really are recently:

https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2018/04/24/survival-of-the-medioc...

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

#287

Post by cirgue »

neolefty wrote: post #29
Dryken wrote: post #2

Anyway none of the company that pretend doing AI are actually doing AI. AI nowadays is pure branding bullshit.

Personally I define AI as software that you "train" rather than "program". In the sense that neural nets and other ML tools function as black boxes rather than explicit logic. By that definition, AI is a real thing—it's built on top of programming that uses compilers and languages and ones and zeros—but it's different and it's valuable . To say it's all bullshit, I feel, is to cut yourself off from new skills. Kind o…

AI carries a set of connotations in popular imagination that a) don't comport with the actual capabilities of what we term 'AI' in the computer science world, and b) are being exploited by marketing teams at IBM and plenty of other companies to sell technologies that aren't particularly new or interesting. The kernel of truth in 'AI is bullshit' is really that the discourse around AI is bullshit, which I think is a pretty fair assessment, and this is coming from someone who's work gets labeled as AI on a regular basis.

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

#288

Post by evrydayhustling »

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…

This is well said, but one reason this double-standard is rational is that current AI systems are far worse at recovery-from-error than humans are. A great example of this is Alexa: if a workflow requires more than one statement to complete, and Alexa fails to understand what you say, you are at the mercy of brittle conversation logic (not AI) to recover. More often than not you have to start over or worse yet execute an incorrect action, then do something new to cancel. In contrasts, even humans who can barely understand each other can build understanding gradually because of the context and knowledge they share.

Our best AIs are superhuman only at tightly scoped tasks, and our prejudice encodes the utility we get from the flexibility and resilience of general intelligence.

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

#289

Post by foldr »

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…

>Unfortunately people compare these to a collection of the best translators in the world.

I don't think that's really true. They're comparing them to the performance of a person who is a native speaker of both of the languages in question. That seems like a pretty reasonable comparison point, since it's basically the ceiling for performance on a translation task (leaving aside literary aspects of translation). If you know what the sentence in the source language means, and if you know the target language, then you can successfully translate. Translation isn't some kind of super difficult task that only specially trained translators can do well. Any human who speaks two languages fluently (which is not rare, looking at the world as a whole) can translate between them well.

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

#290

Post by mhermher »

tomp wrote: post #267
stdgy wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do we know the hardware will adequately support full self-driving if it doesn't actually exist yet? That seems overly optimistic, if not an outright fabrication.

Because humans can do driving with comparable (worse, actually) hardware. Superhuman reflexes mean that software with superhuman driving abilities can exist.

Humans also have human brains, which are much more important to driving than eyes.
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