
A rising sentiment that IBM’s Watson can’t deliver on its promises - artsandsci
http://gizmodo.com/why-everyone-is-hating-on-watson-including-the-people-w-1797510888
======
filereaper
I'm quite late to this thread, but I worked on Watson very briefly (not on the
core development, but overall system performance improvements).

I think there's a major misunderstanding of Watson which isn't helped by IBM's
Marketing efforts. IBM Marketing has been slapping the "Cognitive" label on
everything and is creating unrealistic expectations.

The Jeopardy playing Watson (DeepQA pipeline) was a landmark success at
Information Retrieval, its architecture is built largely on Apache UIMA and
Lucene with proprietary code for scaling out (performance) and filtering &
ranking. I'm not an expert on IR so I won't comment further. This is very
different from Neural Nets that are all the rage in ML today.

I'd like to point the following links from David Ferrucci [1] the original
architect of Watson and this technical publication at aaai.org [2].

The DeepQA pipeline wasn't fluff, the intention was to take this question-
answer pipeline and apply it to other verticals such as Law and Medicine,
essentially replace the Jeopardy playing Watson's corpus of Wikipedia,
Britannica etc... with Legal and Medical equivalents.

Given its runaway PR success, the Watson brand was applied to many other areas
which haven't been successful but I'd like to point out what the original
product was here.

[1] [https://www.singularityweblog.com/david-ferrucci-on-
singular...](https://www.singularityweblog.com/david-ferrucci-on-
singularity-1-on-1-pursue-the-big-challenges/) [2]
[https://www.aaai.org/Magazine/Watson/watson.php](https://www.aaai.org/Magazine/Watson/watson.php)

~~~
denzil_correa
> The Jeopardy playing Watson (DeepQA pipeline) was a landmark success at
> Information Retrieval, its architecture is built largely on Apache UIMA and
> Lucene with proprietary code for scaling out (performance) and filtering &
> ranking. I'm not an expert on IR so I won't comment further. This is very
> different from Neural Nets that are all the rage in ML today.

The question I would like to ask is that if the architecture is built on UIMA
and Lucence, what exactly did "Watson" do?

~~~
filereaper
Apache UIMA came out of the efforts from Ferrucci and others from TJ Watson
Research Lab.

"Watson's" secret sauce was the filtering and ranking, you get multiple
results from the models, which ones do you pick?

There was significant engineering effort put into reducing the latency of
getting answers out of the pipeline as well, you had to optimize given the
constraints of latency, accuracy and confidence from the pipeline.

------
ChuckMcM
When I worked at IBM I expressed concern that the television commercials
depicting a HAL9000 level interactive dialog system were dangerously
overselling what Watson could do.

The challenge, as I saw it, was that no matter how good the tools and products
that were used to help companies with data analysis to improve their
operations were, when they realize they can't talk to a cube and joke with it
about misusing colloquial phrases their disappointment overshadows all the
'good' stuff it was doing for them.

No relationship works well if it starts with a lie and as this article shows,
people do take those ads at face value and assume there really is a talking AI
inside of IBM. Then they are hugely disappointed when they find out it doesn't
exist.

~~~
ethbro
Over-promising has killed AI progress before (expert systems). So history's
just repeating itself.

People want to believe. They'll pay for their belief. Then when projects start
to fail (~5 years after commercialization) they form the opinion that it was
never going to work and they'll never do it again.

... then we wait another decade, repeat.

~~~
olewhalehunter
There's this trend of Expert Systems being commented on as a failure and
starting some sort of AI winter, yet to my knowledge they were among the first
commercially viable digital animation tools, the first high speed trading
platforms, and are still being used successfully in military planning. Where's
the evidence that they were a failure or that they were oversold?

~~~
sgt101
Well, there was this place called "The Turing Institute" which was in Glasgow.
It was run by a very nice man called Don Michie. I met Don a handful of times,
and he was extremely kind and generous to me. He worked at Bletchley Park and
died aged 91 having hit a bridge at 120mph going the wrong way up the M11 at
2am sitting next to his wife who had defected to Russia thirty years before.
Don was driving, at the time he had been blind for six months.

Anyway, The Turing Institute existed because of Don's drive to commercialise
Expert Systems. Don was a driver in the Alvey project which was a grand
project to solve issues around Expert Systems in response to the Japanese
Fifth Generation project. A man called Lighthill then rumbled the Expert
System movement. If you want to watch a demolition of it see the following
video :

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yReDbeY7ZMU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yReDbeY7ZMU)

and the other 5 of them (you will find them in the sidebar!)

Fun fact. In video 6 you can watch Christopher Strachey have a pop at AI.
Christopher didn't work at Bletchley, he was too young, but he did work at
Manchester with Alan Turing and they created computer music and love poetry in
collaboration before Turing killed himself. Strachey went on to be the first
Professor of Computer Science at Oxford, he was a scion of a great family of
artists and poets.

But enough of this. The Turing Institute was an attempt to say "we are right,
look", but in fact it failed. Don was clear why, when you hit 40k rules
knowledge bases became completely intractable. It was impossible to make
improvements or changes. This was christened the Knowledge Acquisition
bottleneck, and Don and others turned to Machine Learning (he liked to call it
Behavioral Cloning) to solve it.

So :

1\. It was done to death by peer review.

2\. It died commercially.

3\. It's main protagonists decided to do something diffferent.

~~~
taneq
> I met Don a handful of times, and he was extremely kind and generous to me.
> He worked at Bletchley Park and died aged 91 having hit a bridge at 120mph
> going the wrong way up the M11 at 2am sitting next to his wife who had
> defected to Russia thirty years before. Don was driving, at the time he had
> been blind for six months.

Wow, what a rollercoaster of a paragraph! Thanks for the story. :)

~~~
yvhhjbb
Clearly that's his way of saying something dodgy happened. Note the mention of
Russia.

~~~
nl
No, I think the poster is mis-remembering things which were based on facts.

Donald Michie did work (with Turing!) at Bletchley Park, and he did die in a
motor vehicle accident. He was 83 when he died (not 91)[1]. His _ex_ -wife[2]
(they had remained friends) was in the car with him and also died. She had
never defected to Russia, but she was (or had been) a member of the communist
party[2].

[1]
[http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/1556846/Professor...](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/1556846/Professor-
Donald-Michie.html)

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne_McLaren](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne_McLaren)

------
tangue
Crédit Mutuel (a french bank) has adopted Watson [0] and it's not encouraging
: it was supposed to help answering emails, : they had to describe manually
the concepts in emails and create topics in which looks a lot like decision-
trees (and reminds me of this 1985 ad for Texas Instrument's Lisp AI
[https://www.scientificamerican.com/media/inline/blog/File/De...](https://www.scientificamerican.com/media/inline/blog/File/Dewdney_Mandelbrot.pdf)
scroll to see the ad)

Indeed the whole thing looks like a database with basic AI as a sales
argument...

[0 - in french] [http://www.silicon.fr/credit-mutuel-non-ia-watson-
magique-17...](http://www.silicon.fr/credit-mutuel-non-ia-watson-
magique-173889.html)

~~~
Spooky23
Totally. I observed a support chatbot project that didn't quite meet up with
the vision.

Even based on the technical marketing claims the consultants were coming in
with, it was a product less capable than the IBM Prolog-based expert systems
that I built out 15-20 years ago to triage and correlate network events in a
large WAN infrastructure.... and that was a product with a whole slew of major
implementation and operational problems!

~~~
shpx
Chatbots are glorified command line interfaces. With no man pages.

~~~
JSONwebtoken
Sure, if you ignore the advancements of NLP in the past few years. Sometimes I
wish I had NLP in my terminal to autocorrect my typos.

~~~
Spooky23
NLP is amazing. But getting facts and information into a chat bot is not easy
or cheap.

Typically people are deploying chatbots as a cost cutting measure to reduce
labor. Sometimes that means using the chatbot as a fancy IVR, getting
customers to abandon the transaction or any of several other paths. Actually
answering the questions doesn't always matter!

------
slackingoff2017
IBM is a dying giant, I've seen it languishing for years. Their massive screw
up was a decade ago when they decided shareholder value was more important
than having good engineers. They've since gutted their R&D departments and all
that's left are duds and underpaid undereducated consultants rented from
places like Accenture.

The only good thing to come out of IBM in years is their Hyperscan regex
library and unsurprisingly they don't market it at all or build practical
applications with it

~~~
WalterBright
In the 80's IBM was an unstoppable juggernaut. In the 90's it was Microsoft.
Then Apple. Now Google/Amazon.

Conventional wisdom is that, in a free market, a single corporation will grow
to rule everything. But that never seems to pan out.

Part of the reason is that the larger an organization gets, the more
inefficient and bureaucratic it gets, the less it is able to adapt. See "The
Innovator's Dilemma", a book everyone interested in business should read.

~~~
aphextron
Oddly enough Microsoft is the only company I can see bucking this trend right
now. The other big guys youve mentioned have essentially slumped down into
their respective markets and drawn up battle lines, whereas MS really seems to
be pushing into new territory. I wouldnt be surprised to see them come back
into mobile with a Surface phone that gives Apple a run for their money.

~~~
gaius
_Oddly enough Microsoft is the only company I can see bucking this trend right
now._

I'll second that - both Azure and Surface are best-in-class.

~~~
tomrod
Eh, Azure is not that great. It's okay.

~~~
MandieD
Azure is an absolute joy to use and administer compared to IBM Bluemix.

~~~
antod
>> Eh, Azure is not that great. It's okay.

> Azure is an absolute joy to use and administer compared to IBM Bluemix.

Note to other readers: although slightly tangential, these two comments do not
actually disagree or contradict each other.

------
laichzeit0
I had problems with Watson to the effect that not even the documentation
matches reality. There are some fairly basic things missing from their NERC
offering. I can tell you that the functionality that is missing is so basic
(e.g. negation) that without a doubt, no one in IBM has ever used this
offering in practise beyond a toy example.

The idea that IBM Watson is some uniform AI in a box with a bunch of REST
API's to "expose" its intelligence seems to be the sales pitch. It's not. It's
just a bunch of acquired products (you can see this when e.g. Watson Knowledge
Studio breaks and you see the Python scripts that glues everything together in
the backend) that are poorly integrated, probably because the left hand has no
idea what the right hand is doing.

Caveat emptor!

[https://stackoverflow.com/questions/44796501/ibm-watson-
know...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/44796501/ibm-watson-knowledge-
studio-entities-with-role-attribute-and-extracting-it-fro)
[https://stackoverflow.com/questions/44800879/ibm-watson-
know...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/44800879/ibm-watson-knowledge-
studio-annotating-negative-negated-mentions)

------
peteretep
A couple of years ago I was given a project that was essentially "Evaluate
Watson APIs to see if there's anything there we could make use of", and came
away with the distinct impression that it was largely smoke and mirrors, and
there was very little that was either effective or interesting there.

~~~
maxxxxx
Our IT department has been talking about Watson for a while but I never could
get anything out of them what it's really supposed to do. From what I can tell
it's a very slick marketing term with some mediocre tech behind it.

~~~
dguaraglia
As far as I understand (and I have only passing knowledge on this, as we've
been evaluating machine learning technologies for our startup) IBM Watson is
just a set of APIs you can use to build your own solution, and the APIs
themselves are not top-of-the-line (Google's are.)

The other day I saw a TV ad for Watson for the first time: the ad showed a
bunch of aeronautical engineers who instead of having to take all kinds of
measurements of airflow around a hull or who knows what else (the TV was
muted) now sat behind a single computer that would do the whole thing for
them. It was such bullshit, I couldn't believe my eyes.

Imagine Amazon promoting SES as this amazing tool that'd automatically send
marketing emails and create a marketing funnel and drive user acquisition cost
down by a factor of 100X, without you having to do anything. That's the level
of vaporware they are selling.

~~~
RHSman2
Very few out of the box machine learning services work other than speech-to-
text by the worlds greatest company in that field (google). It's not a case of
roll your own but find companies that can help you deliver s solution to your
specific problem. (That is my business) This is the absolute bullshit of
Watson. What it could be is a series of very good datasets and then being able
to build models (based on recipes) and deploy them. It's so unbelievably
clunky though. And Bluemix? Urgh

------
notfromhere
The dirty secret is that IBM Watson is just a brand for their army of data
consultants, and their consultants aren't very good. In my experience working
for a competitor in this space, IBM Watson was widely agreed to be smoke and
mirrors without much going on

~~~
ibm_throwaway
Former IBM Watson data scientist here.

At first I was annoyed by your comment, but then I realized how true it is and
sulked instead.

The good consultants are leaving as soon as they hit the end of their first
promotion cycle. The duds stick around and assume the upper-level manager
roles. The group is in bad shape now and poised to get worse in the coming
years.

~~~
ethbro
As someone who's worked in that space, I'll repost the short version of a
comment I made before: it's an economics problem.

Services Profit = Bid - Employee Cost + Upsales

Bids are only so flexible. Employee cost is much easier to minimize. So
inevitably, all consultancies trend towards providing the cheapest employees
that will satisfy the customer. And if the customer isn't constantly vigilant,
the quality can get pretty dire indeed (BAs who just learned to "code"
yesterday).

~~~
tootie
Holy shit man. This was literally my experience with Accenture. I worked side-
by-side with them on a massive IT project. Their team was like 60 liberal arts
grads willing to work 80 hours a week configuring some COTS software and 4
managers making sure they don't go home. I think they just use India now
instead.

~~~
seibelj
One thing I love about HN is the willingness of people to name names in
stories. I don't always do it because of fears of repercussion, but I
appreciate people like you who do. Thanks for saying the word "Accenture".

~~~
yborg
In this case, the names are completely interchangeable. I had precisely the
same experience years ago on a large ERP project on which Deloitte was the
lead consultant. After the beachhead team (which was good) rolled off the
project, the backfill consisted of an army of fresh-outs straight from
Deloitte's consultant boot camp, billed out at a rate a developer with 6-7
years of experience should have cost.

------
blueyes
IBM has almost zero credibility in deep learning and AI. They haven't hired
anyone of note. They haven't produced any novel or influential research in the
field in years. And yet they air these cheesy Dylan ads and the rubes fall for
it. Watson is a Theranos-scale fraud, and it's finally coming out.

~~~
pas
Was the Jeopardy think just a ruse? Was it something easy (something any ML/DL
team could have thrown together in a year?)

~~~
martingoodson
No it was a hard engineering challenge. But it solved a very specific problem
that has no relevance to most business use-cases.

~~~
ethbro
Also, at effectively unlimited cost. Are there any numbers how much they spent
on making it work?

~~~
sgt101
30 people (ish) for 3 years + 10 million on hardware?

The brilliance of the team... priceless.

The cost of everything, the value of nothing : this is what will be written on
the tombstone of capitalism.

------
throwaway_ibm
I know someone who is intimately involved with IBM Watson, they are highly
educated and _constantly_ diss the system. Calling it, 'Just a large
database'. If Watson was a true breakthrough, it should be gaining marketshare
throughout it's specialities but it's not. Google is leading the industry with
DeepMind; Facebook and Microsoft aren't far behind. I'd encourage others to be
very skeptical of the PR that IBM is pushing about their Watson problem.

disclosure: I haven't read the article but wanted to share a related story.

------
ams6110
What? A brand name which is just a word meaning "IBM Enterprise Products and
Services" doesn't really live up to the marketing hype? I can't imagine such a
thing.

------
strict9
Many years ago when I worked for a company that decided our existing ecommerce
app was too terrible to fix and would be too much effort to rebuild, we talked
to a number of vendors, including IBM. The marketing materials and salespeople
made a compelling case, but deeper dives into the app itself and the support
engineers behind it convinced even the most enthusiastic internal cheerleaders
to look elsewhere.

In recent years as news articles heralding the future of Watson for various
industries (including healthcare and supply chain), I predicted a similar
path. An amazing product in a very narrow environment designed specifically
for marketing and selling purposes, and not very adaptable.

FTA: “And everybody’s very happy to claim to work with Watson,” Perlich said.
“So I think right now Watson is monetizing primarily on the brand perception.”

This is painfully obvious, as this has been IBM for a very long time.

------
scottlocklin
Yeah, well, "duh." What boggles my mind is people will read this, nod sadly,
and continue not to notice that a whole bunch of what they think they know
about machine learning, autonomous vehicles and so on is also marketing
department hype.

~~~
mattnewton
I don't know if that's fair. To take self driving cars as an example, I've
seen cars driving themselves around mountain View and Waymo isn't promising
much more than that. Watson had ads with an intelligent voice but they were
selling a bunch of programmers to make expert systems like it was the 80's but
in java this time. I think by comparison those other fields are promising less
and delivering more. Even if there is still a gap between what people think
will happen in the next 10 years and what we can likely deliver in the next
10, it's nowhere like what is described in the article.

~~~
scottlocklin
C'mon man! Google allows one to check on their promises and their progress.
For example, from 2012:

[http://www.computerworld.com/article/2491635/vertical-
it/sel...](http://www.computerworld.com/article/2491635/vertical-it/self-
driving-cars-a-reality-for--ordinary-people--within-5-years--says-google-s-
sergey-b.html)

"Such "autonomous vehicles" will be a reality for "ordinary people" in less
than five years, Google co-founder Sergey Brin said Tuesday."

How's that working out for you Sergey?

Self driving tech hasn't moved appreciably since the 90s. Computers are
better. More people are trying it. Reality is, it's just collision avoidance
with GPS. They rely on maps; what happens when the maps change? What happens
when a kid runs out in front of one of these things?

~~~
mattnewton
Sergey isn't taking people's money based on that promise. As an engineer I
don't beat people up about realizing how hard problems are and not releasing
crappy products. Missing estimates happens. It's another thing entirely to try
and pass off a product as something it isn't to a buyer.

~~~
scottlocklin
I dunno it kind of looks like they're going to eventually take someone's money
based on similar promises.

[http://money.cnn.com/2017/05/24/investing/google-waymo-
self-...](http://money.cnn.com/2017/05/24/investing/google-waymo-self-driving-
car-valuation-alphabet/index.html)

I mean, the fact that they've been using funds from advertising to research
this problem is admirable in some sense, but they are actually taking
someone's money to do this.

Hype from marketing departments on technical matters is not to be trusted.

~~~
gaius
That someone being the shareholders who could have gotten that money as
dividends.

------
chisleu
I'm late but have something to add.

Until last week I was on a 6 month contract as a senior DevOps engineer for
IBM/Watson. I was responsible for one of the huge real-time data ingestion
pipelines that Watson receives. I left to work elsewhere in spite of being
offered an excellent position. (If you guys are reading this, hi.)

I went to IBM not expecting much more than working as a cog in a lumbering
giant.

Watson is the fastest growing part of IBM. If IBM has all of those eggs in one
basket, it is the Watson basket. There were lots of jokes about cognitive in
the office pool.

That said, it was by far one of the best managed companies I've seen. They
have some fantastic data engineers and scientists. They are backing most of
the open source projects related to AI and next generation tech. Spark,
VoltDB...

The ads might seem sensational, but the concept of a black box that orders
preemptive maintenance for an elevator isn't far fetched...

More over, Watson had so many current customers because it is valuable. The
technical advisors that but products don't put faith in ads any more than we
do.

------
dpflan
I like how IBM does very elaborate marketing ploys to hype their wares: like
Deep Blue competing against Kasparov and Watson competing against Jennings to
showcase IBM's engineering prowess. But it does sell the idea pretty well I
think, but perhaps the idea is too grand/far ahead of the present.

~~~
forgot-my-pw
Deep blue was just a brute force machine. Perhaps Watson isn't much different,
just slightly smarter.

~~~
zone411
Saying something like this does a big disservice to IBM's real accomplishment.
Code a brute force chess engine, add some alpha-beta pruning, transposition
table, or even some of your heuristics and let us know how it does. Just
because it's not an adversarial RNN or whatever, it doesn't mean it's brute
force.

------
simonh
This just goes to show just how tragically far away we are from even beginning
to build the rudiments of a strong general purpose AI. For all the fantastic
achievements of systems like Watson and Alphago, and they are amazing
achievements, they are radically optimised special purpose systems fine tuned
to solving one extremely specific and narrow problem, and that problem only.

Watson is a case study in this, but I know Google has big plans for applying
the tech behind Alphago in medicine. I wish them every success, but I'm
concerned they will hit similar specialisation issues.

~~~
sgt101
Medicine - the biggest prize, the biggest trap. Every complication, huge, mind
blowing rewards. Maybe, if Google were to go 100% they could break the
beast... but it's a 100bn bet.

~~~
simonh
Untill you actually have a viable, testable plan to implement it almost allege
money you throw at it is pretty much certain to be wasted.

The Manhattan project is often given as an example, but that project was based
on solid theoretical models and repeatable experiments. They knew exactly what
they were doing and how they were going to do it.

The problem in AI at the moment is mainly developing talent and expertise, not
capital funding. I'm all for advanced research into technologies. However we
need to advance that research on as many different fronts as possible in a
flexible way simply because we don't know how we are going to solve the
problem of general AI. Guessing on an approach and spending billions on it
would be a complete waste. We're simply not at a point where that would do any
good.

~~~
sgt101
Agree, they should have focused on much more tractable domains before
Medicine.

I think that there's an business case issue here; MBA's see this as the mega
win, the research staff can't say "it won't work" (because you are immediately
flagged as an obstacle to progress and the execs either cease to listen
because they don't want to hear, or you get bullied with an avalanche of
attacks on your team or sacked).

------
Probooks
Problem is deeper (and simpler). IBM does not look for clients, but rather
victims. We clients end up being caught in an internal upsales fight. Nobody
cares which is the best solution IBM as a whole can offer to you (their own
people do not even know all their available tools!), but rather how much
suboptimal stuff each salesman can load onto you. I'm on my way out of IBM...

------
speeder
I actually love the idea of Watson being used for healthcare...

Sadly I think it is being used wrong...

IBM is focusing on using Watson to cure very specific diseases, like certain
types of cancer.

I think a far better use for Watson would be to do initial diagnosis, for
example my life got massively delayed because I got hypothyroidism as
teenager, but only using internet data I could self-diagnose and self-treat
(because doctors are still unwilling to help, not trusting data, and before
someone come berate me for self-treatment, it is working...) as adult I could
finally get my life 'started' (hypothyroidism affect physical and mental
development, and slows down metabolism and the brain)

During my quest I met many, many, many people on internet, that had self-
diagnosed with something using the internet as a tool. All of us would have
been diagnosed properly if Watson was being used on the doctors office, using
its data crunching capabilities and symptoms as input to find out what problem
we had. (in my case: I have Hashimoto's disease)

~~~
vslira
Why would professionals support tech that makes their labor less scarce?
Unfortunately this change won't come from doctors

~~~
pwthornton
Doctors might fear it, but healthcare administrators would certainly love for
a tool to help make diagnosis faster, more accurate and less expensive.

~~~
sgt101
If it worked in that way, which it currently doesn't (see comments about
question answering systems and Jeopardy) in terms of the state of the art,
we're... maybe 30 years off that, like as in we're 30 years off fusion.

Think about the human condition, think about human biology. Be clear- these
are systems beyond current science... and doctors deal with them every day!

~~~
roywiggins
The current push seems to be in radiology. An AI that never sleeps and can
read images and give you a good estimate of whether something is a tumor? It
probably wouldn't replace humans entirely but it could be the first place that
AI really gets into the process of diagnosis.

------
dislikes_IBM
IBM has a toxic culture. They are the vendor lock-in Gods. Every company I've
ever worked for has cringed at the mention of IBM, never suggested them as a
new solution, and always regretted whatever if anything they locked themselves
into.

They are the only company that charges you to sample their API's. They are the
absolute worst, an infection that needs to be cured.

~~~
johngarrison
Sometimes I wish I was wealthy enough to buy out horrible companies, just so I
could have the power to dismantle them and end the suffering.

~~~
Method-X
You wouldn't be wealthy for very long ;)

------
jjm
They had so much time to contribute but instead chose marketing and pushed
into areas where they didn't really have a handle on yet. As in management
didn't understand.

I mean all the datasets, dozens of libraries, stunning NN demos and training
sets, TPUs (multiple versions at that!) all could've come out of the company.

Think if keras and tensor flow were from IBM. Or all those cars now running
Nvidia Jetson, or mega datacenters running NV100s or Google TPUs.

Shoot they even had a chance to enhance PowerPC ICs for NNs.

Alas but nope.

------
tCfD
Obvious fix is for IBM to put Watson on a blockchain /s

~~~
samfriedman
You jest, but they're not above "throw a blockchain on it" levels of buzzword-
chasing: [https://www.ibm.com/us-en/marketplace/z14](https://www.ibm.com/us-
en/marketplace/z14)

------
ghostly_s
I overheard a good-'ol-boy businessman at a hotel bar a few months back. He
bore an eerie likeness to Bosworth from Halt and Catch Fire, and was telling a
younger gentleman about a project he worked on. "...so Watson comes in and
they Algorithm the whole thing..."

I'm pretty sure he thought Watson was a person.

------
crsv
Replace IBM's Watson with anything branded with "AI" right now and themes in
the article still hold up.

~~~
bsg75
It is likely that AI has not matured to the level its being marketed at
currently?

And that the over hyping of it today will negatively impact its adoption when
ready for general use?

~~~
scottlocklin
It happened in the 80s.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_winter](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_winter)

It will happen again. The use of the phrase "artificial intelligence" itself
ought to be forbidden until such a thing actually exists in the corporeal
world.

~~~
Barrin92
>It will happen again

maybe an 'AI recession' is plausible but a large scale loss of interest is
unlikely given that AI / ML / deep learning (pick your favourite word) is
already too embedded in commercial application.

Like always the hype in the field is strong, but this time we actually have
the data growth we need to produce palpable results (and already have).

------
batmansmk
You can try by yourself. [https://alchemy-language-
demo.mybluemix.net/](https://alchemy-language-demo.mybluemix.net/)

Imagine analyzing product reviews to determine if it was positive or negative.
Type "I like it", and see the inaccurate targeted sentiment (neutral sentiment
instead of positive).

~~~
guyfawkes303
I tried this, and while 'targeted sentiment' may be neutral, 'document
emotion' has Joy at 0.880435 vs the rest at 0.

If you change your example from 'I like it' to 'I like puppies', the 'targeted
sentiment' changes from neutral to 'puppies positive 0.550431'.

While the first example you found does seem odd, the rest seems to work quite
well. Maybe it just has problems attaching 'it' to a 'target'.

~~~
foldr
It has trouble with negation outside the relevant clause. So it is not fooled
by e.g. "I don't hate it" vs. "I don't like it", but the first of the
following two sentences is rated more negative than the second:

I don't seem to hate it.

I don't seem to like it.

 _Edit_ : In fact it can even be fooled just by increasing the linear distance
between a positive term and negation. The following is rated +0.6!

I don't in any way shape or form like it.

------
ExactoKnight
Watson's Natural Language Classifier, in particular its categorization API, is
actually pretty impressive...

------
etiam
It's tempting to start whispering winter is coming, but I think one may
reasonably hope that the current fashions at large have enough nuance to
differentiate between this particular marketing gimmick and the broader
developments in ML.

Personally I'd be happy to see the paragraphs/minutes at the beginning of far
too many interviews about "intelligent" machines exchanged, from straightening
out the misconception that Watson is an example of this new hot "Deep
Learning" thing and one of the pinnacles of achievement in the field, for some
type of more valuable type of commentary from leading researchers.

------
dboreham
Bundle up for the second AI Winter...

~~~
bitL
Third actually. But it's just Watson; Deep Learning and its derivations are
here to stay as they are already state-of-art and close to humans.

~~~
z3phyr
They are not close to humans at all. They are good for very specific tasks
only.

Edit: Spelling

~~~
bitL
You are right - for specific tasks. E.g. in computer vision they are able to
surpass humans for static image recognition. For image segmentation they are
getting close already. For generating art they IMO have surpassed some
"artists" already ;-)

If you think about it, even with 90% accuracy they are worth it as they could
almost automate some cognitively-difficult tasks and for those instances that
they can't do it properly, a human can intervene. So instead of 10 humans
watching over something you end up with a single one. It would take some time
until all we have in the research is in production and that will change a lot
of things. After that there might be another AI winter (who knows if we can do
general intelligence?), but with current pipeline it might take a while to
reach plateau.

------
outside1234
You don't say! This is IBM consulting ware? Who would have guessed!

------
PaulHoule
This was my opinion when they started running these ads. My opinion has
actually softened a little.

Some of the cognitive services they are offering today are not half bad; also
I can say their salespeople are doing a gangbusters job in places.

------
ceedan
Does IBM itself even "use" Watson?

~~~
marvel_boy
Of course not. Watson is just a marketing trick to charge for consultants. I
worked there.

~~~
ceedan
This has always been my assumption. If Watson did anything close to how it's
advertised, IBM would have a big competitive advantage by actually using it.

------
et2o
I saw a very humorous twitter exchange between a bioinformatician and IBM
Watson's twitter account. The scientist asked them to provide any peer-
reviewed ML publications and the best they could do was an __abstract __at a
regional conference no-one has heard of. And it was a terrible abstract.

It's completely marketing. IBM still has a good name among people who don't
know much about technology. They're trading on this and the current saturation
of 'machine learning' in the popular press.

~~~
sgt101
That's mad as IBM have loads of peer reviewed ML publications.

3 minutes of searching :

[http://researcher.watson.ibm.com/researcher/view_group_pubs....](http://researcher.watson.ibm.com/researcher/view_group_pubs.php?grp=5443)

[http://researcher.watson.ibm.com/researcher/view_group_pubs....](http://researcher.watson.ibm.com/researcher/view_group_pubs.php?grp=4384)

c'mon

~~~
et2o
I should have added: healthcare. No shit IBM _research_ has publications, they
have their own journal. Also, 15 publications in 3 years is pathetic. c'mon

~~~
sgt101
Well, the operational people will struggle to publish because it won't be on
their scorecard, so effectively they won't be paid for it. Additionally many
of them won't have any skills relevant to creating an academic publication and
no nice professor to help them do it. So if IBM are going to publish it will
be their lab.

In terms of publication rates, in universities it's a mill. All academics are
measured on publication impact and because of the arbitrary and self
reinforcing nature of impact the way to win is to sprinkle as many papers
around as you can get your graduate student factory as you possibly can. The
question is what is the actual utility of minting out the same paper with nine
different authors?

------
currymj
it's just a brand name at this point, which they attach to any machine
learning they develop or acquire, and they should stop trying to sell it as a
distinct technology.

------
diego_moita
> "In the data-science community the sense is that whatever Watson can do, you
> can probably get as freeware somewhere, or possibly build yourself with your
> own knowledge"

Any suggestions about the freeware?

~~~
sgt101
MLlib

Tensorflow

Lime

There you go.

~~~
nl
_MLib_

The Watson of machine learning libraries.

As someone who has used MLib and raised a number of bugs and feature requests:
Use Spark for feature engineering and then Scikit for ML.

------
JimsWonderWorld
The IBM Watson win on jeopardy was completely made up. IBM does not have an AI
that can answer natural language questions now and they also did not have that
7 years ago. IBM'ers are delusional.

------
moomin
Completely off topic, but didn't IBM have a system called Watson in the 1990s
that was used by the police? Try as I might I can't find a reference for it
anywhere.

~~~
rjsw
Maybe you are thinking of the product from Harlequin [1].

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xanalys](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xanalys)

~~~
moomin
I think you're right... thanks.

------
d--b
watson's mistake is to have gone the chat bot route. promising a natural
language input for all underlying problems simply discredits everything
else...

------
riku_iki
Any first firings for choosing IBM?..

------
iamleppert
The real crime is in using cancer kids to sell your product. I mean, who even
does that? Even if you could cure cancer for kids, I find it incredibly tacky
to go around making commercials about how you can cure cancer for kids, which
aren't targeted at those who actually are in the position to use the
technology, and its used to market to other tangential industries where the
real money is. It's just despicable and you can tell right there its smoke and
mirrors.

There's a special place in hell for anyone working at IBM or involved in the
Watson project who is supporting this thing. It's damaging legitimate deep
learning/machine learning industry and generally making a fool out of IBM, AND
giving children with cancer false hope....just so IBM can try and stay
_relevant_ and _make money_?

~~~
orf
> The real crime is in using cancer kids to sell your product. I mean, who
> even does that??

Charities?

~~~
ryanmarsh
Can confirm

Source: former president of children's cancer research foundation

In my defense we were actually trying to make a difference in the world not
sell software.

~~~
radarsat1
> we were actually trying to make a difference in the world not sell software.

I mean, to be fair, I don't think selling software and trying to make a
difference in the world are at odds with each other.

------
megamindbrian
Everything to do with IBM is too expensive for the average user.

------
potatoman2
Did they really need to stick an insult at Trump in there?

~~~
colejohnson66
As much as I hate bringing politics into places it wasn't, this wasn't from
the author; It was from a quote

> "IBM Watson is the Donald Trump of the AI industry—outlandish claims

> that aren’t backed by credible data," said Oren Etzioni, CEO of the

> Allen Institute for AI and former computer science professor.

> "Everyone—journalists included—know[s] that the emperor has no clothes,

> but most are reluctant to say so."

------
oculusthrift
the articles content is more just background about watson than having to do
with the the title.

as a side note: it just sounds wrong to have the words "hating on" in an
article title.

