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IBM Dumping $1 Billion Into New Watson Group
Nerval's Lobster writes "IBM believes its Watson supercomputing platform is much more than a gameshow-winning gimmick: its executives are betting very big that the software will fundamentally change how people and industries compute. In the beginning, IBM assigned 27 core researchers to the then-nascent Watson. Working diligently, those scientists and developers built a tough 'Jeopardy!' competitor. Encouraged by that success on live television, Big Blue devoted a larger team to commercializing the technology—a group it made a point of hiding in Austin, Texas, so its members could better focus on hardcore research. After years of experimentation, IBM is now prepping Watson to go truly mainstream. As part of that upgraded effort (which includes lots of hype-generating), IBM will devote a billion dollars and thousands of researchers to a dedicated Watson Group, based in New York City at 51 Astor Place. The company plans on pouring another $100 million into an equity fund for Watson's growing app ecosystem. If everything goes according to IBM's plan, Watson will help kick off what CEO Ginni Rometty refers to as a third era in computing. The 19th century saw the rise of a "tabulating" era: the birth of machines designed to count. In the latter half of the 20th century, developers and scientists initiated the 'programmable' era—resulting in PCs, mobile devices, and the Internet. The third (potential) era is 'cognitive,' in which computers become adept at understanding and solving, in a very human way, some of society's largest problems. But no matter how well Watson can read, understand and analyze, the platform will need to earn its keep. Will IBM's clients pay lots of money for all that cognitive power? Or will Watson ultimately prove an overhyped sideshow?"
..your city / state / whatever region, hasn't counted on call centres being a major source of employment, because that shit is going bye bye.
Soon.
I guess they are going to turn Watson loose on the stock market and make their billion back in a nanosecond...
Will IBM's clients pay lots of money for all that cognitive power?
While TFA emphasizes the correlation between "cognitive" and the previous "jeopardy success", that jeopardy program was still extremely far away from human reasoning. The answer to that questions is: Of course. The ultimate goal of computing is the human reasoning. Once that step is reached, there is no reason the computer would not be able to improve that "cognitive power" by it(him)self, providing revolutionary reasoning power, thanks to almost unlimited potential hardware extensions which is available to the computer, contrary to the human brain, limited to relatively little progress thanks to hard learning and working.
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
It just might show the ultimate clue for computer intelligence: The ability to determine a personal gain and advantage from telling a lie.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
You're thinking of seed AI: A program capable of self improvement. The better it gets, the better it can make itsself, which means it can thus get even better. A positive feedback loop that potentially leads to something far beyond human capabilities or understanding.
Watson isn't that. It can answer questions, but it has no ability to comprehend complex problems, and it certainly cannot devise novel solutions. It is essentially a highly sophisticated knowledge-based search engine. Perhaps one of Watson's successors, in a few decades.
Nah, Google would rather invest more money in schemes to compete with Facebook which is consistent with their business strategy so far since they've always made their money from advertising. And IBM has been about corporate infrastructure for a long time. As many have noted, Watson isn't about being a true A.I. It's about being able to fire all your call center techs.
Why do you think it's AI ? Sounds to me 'just' a 'big-data' application.
As far as I've been able to determine it's just a cluster of machines running Apache Hadoop and some of their own software to shift through data:
Watson's software was written in various languages, including Java, C++, and Prolog, and uses Apache Hadoop framework for distributed computing, Apache UIMA (Unstructured Information Management Architecture) framework, IBM’s DeepQA software and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 operating system. According to IBM, "more than 100 different techniques are used to analyze natural language, identify sources, find and generate hypotheses, find and score evidence, and merge and rank hypotheses."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watson_(computer)#Software
New things are always on the horizon
IBM has several large customers already using it, they even pitched it to the company I work for. The things they have it doing around predictive analytics are really impressive.
Why do you think it's AI ? Sounds to me 'just' a 'big-data' application.
As far as I've been able to determine it's just a cluster of machines running Apache Hadoop and some of their own software to shift through data.
These characterizations are not exactly wrong, but they are not useful. To discuss Watson in terms of its implementing technologies is to completely miss the point, as does dismissing it as a 'big-data app' (real AI, when it arrives, may well have 'big data' attributes.) The use of 'just' here is a misleading application of emphasis.
I don't think Watson deserves to be called AI either, but it is impressive, nonetheless.
Watson is not AI. It is clever NLP, but basically just a fast, parallelized database with some learning capabilities. That does not mean it is useless, but it cannot do most things non-experts would expect from an AI and its application is limited to certain types of tasks. Simplified, what it can do is apply things it finds in "books" in standard-situations. To be fair, this is the level many (most?) humans never really exceed either.
Also interestingly, when IBM representatives speak to experts, they never call Watson an AI. I have observed that several times now. So IBM does understand clearly what they have in Watson and what not.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
IBM is spending a billion dollars on AI. That's serious. IBM usually succeeds at making what they set out to make.
In the past, that was true because IBM had some genius leadership at the top in the past. I do not believe that to be true today. The current management at IBM has one goal - to keep their stock price high. As a result, they continually gut first world employees and reports are that they are saving management jobs as they send people in the trenches home with a severance package. I worked for a company on a previous job that tried this approach and it was not successful. IBM seems to be a pretty employee hostile place to work in places like the USA and it's hard for me to believe that this bet is going to pay off, but we shall see.