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IBM To Offer Watson Services In the Cloud

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the silver-lining dept.

jfruh writes "Have you ever wanted to write code for Watson, IBM's Jeopardy-winning supercomputer? Well, now you can, sort of. Big Blue has created a standardized server that runs Watson's unique learning and language-recognition software, and will be selling developers access to these boxes as a cloud-based service. No pricing has been announced yet."

15 of 56 comments (clear)

  1. My first question to it: by Tablizer · · Score: 4, Funny

    "Watson, what exactly is cloud computing?"

    --
    Table-ized A.I.
    1. Re:My first question to it: by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

      "Watson, what exactly is cloud computing?"

      The epitome of vaporware?

    2. Re:My first question to it: by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 5, Funny

      "Watson, what exactly is cloud computing?"

      "Well, sonny, since my API is billed per PVU per hour, let me tell you a story that my grandaddy told me:

      Once upon a time, when men were men and bought their calculatin' machines from IBM, folks who were too poor to lease a calculating machine of their own would lease part of somebody elses. Then minicomputers came, and destroyed the good old days with fire and sword. Then microcomputers came, and slaughtered the minicomputers for their sins. But the minicomputers sucked, and had neither reliability, nor redundancy, nor Administrators to lead them. And Lo, the 'freedom' of the users turned to mere license, and became as ashes in their mouths."

      Now, sonny, the minicomputers and users have repented and look to 'the cloud' to restore the glory of the old order, where man leased, and owned not, and Administrators watched over the users, and guided them.

    3. Re:My first question to it: by binarylarry · · Score: 3, Funny

      I'm sorry that's incorrect.

      The correct answer was: What is a vapid buzzword?

      --
      Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
  2. Correction by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    "IBM To Offer Watson Services Via the internet"

    "Have you ever wanted to write code for Watson, IBM's Jeopardy-winning supercomputer? Well, now you can, sort of. Big Blue has created a standardized server that runs Watson's unique learning and language-recognition software, and will be selling developers access to these boxes over the internet. No pricing has been announced yet."

    Brought to you by the Association To Remove That Stupid Buzzword "THE CLOUD" and replace it with its more precise and simple meaning: "The internet"/"server"/etc.

    1. Re: Correction by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Let me guess, that you drive an Iron Horse to work?

  3. Watson sold as Watson by blue_adept · · Score: 4, Interesting

    The fact that IBM is selling Watson as Watson just goes to show that Watson didn't in fact lead to anything interesting, in terms of general purpose AI. I always considered Watson to be Eliza on steroids, even in the midst of the marketing hype, and so far my prediction seems to be true. There was a lot of noise initially about how Watson was being sent to medical school, was going to be plugged into medical databases, etc etc. So far, from what I can tell, Watson is an expert system, just like Deep Blue -- good at the narrow problem it tries to solve, but not a good model for human cognition or language processing per se.

    --

    "Is this just useless, or is it expensive as well?"
    1. Re:Watson sold as Watson by Charliemopps · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Yea, but we aren't even remotely there yet. The fact that we have a lot of computers that can process even more than the human brain can, yet we can't come closer to the consciousness of a cockroach that a very complicated SQL statement should tell us something. There is something fundamental about the mind that we do not grasp yet.

    2. Re:Watson sold as Watson by mechtech256 · · Score: 2

      We don't have computers that can process information like the human brain can.

      Humans have 10 billion neurons, each connected to 10,000 other neurons for a total of 100 trillion connections.

      The brain is also far more parallel than computers are. Supercomputers are also quite parallel, but the "architectures" of the brain and silicon are still so different that studies of the brain must emulate neuron activity through software, which is very inefficient and incapable of running anywhere near 100 trillion synapses concurrently.

      The crisscrossed nature of neurons and synapses creates a pretty nasty situation when scaling up to more and more neurons. It's certainly not a linear increase as you add more neurons, it becomes exponentially more complex to model and is one of the worst layouts for computers to simulate.

    3. Re:Watson sold as Watson by JamieIanMacgregor · · Score: 2

      the fundamental thing they're missing is that computers are perfect in their instruction execution, there will be more 'human like' AI when you have a system that doesn't always get the correct answer, forgets and deliberately ignores instructions.

  4. And the old is new again... by QuietLagoon · · Score: 3, Interesting
    Am I the only person here who remembers buying time on IBM's mainframes back in the day? OK, so the Internet has replaced IBM SNA, and the mainframe is now called The Cloud.

    .
    So, the PC revolution lasted 30 years, and now we're back to where we were in 1983.

    1. Re:And the old is new again... by JamieIanMacgregor · · Score: 2

      probably, back then it was easy enough to just steal someone's credentials and use their system for free... until the pesky government found all those extra charges and international leased line usage fees (pre-internet internet) which added up to more than a new car is worth these days. my buddies always had the latest doom updates though.

  5. The Other Watson by wrackspurt · · Score: 2

    In February 2013, IBM announced that Watson software system's first commercial application would be for utilization management decisions in lung cancer treatment at Memorial Sloanâ"Kettering Cancer Center in conjunction with health insurance company WellPoint.[12] IBM Watsonâ(TM)s business chief Manoj Saxena says that 90% of nurses in the field who use Watson now follow its guidance.

    Watson is an artificially intelligent computer system capable of answering questions posed in natural language,[2] developed in IBM's DeepQA project by a research team led by principal investigator David Ferrucci. Watson was named after IBM's Thomas J. Watson.

    It's surprising the number of people outside of IT who think it was named after Dr. Watson from the Sherlock Holmes books. "Elementary my dear Dr. Watson." Apparently AI still hasn't made it past let alone through what we take as elementary.

  6. Hello World Example? by LifesABeach · · Score: 2

    I've been looking, but I haven't seen specifications.

  7. Elementary by Frankie70 · · Score: 2

    It's surprising the number of people who think Sherlock Holmes said "Elementary, my dear Watson". Holmes didn't utter that exact phrase in any one of the books written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.