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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."

4 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 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.

  2. 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.