Does Watson Have the Answer To Big Blue's Uncertain Future?

HughPickens.com writes: IBM has recently delivered a string of disappointing quarters, and announced recently that it would take a multibillion-dollar hit to offload its struggling chip business. But Will Knight writes at MIT Technology Review that Watson may have the answer to IBM's uncertain future. IBM's vast research department was recently reorganized to ramp up efforts related to cognitive computing. The push began with the development of the original Watson, but has expanded to include other areas of software and hardware research aimed at helping machines provide useful insights from huge quantities of often-messy data. "We're betting billions of dollars, and a third of this division now is working on it," says John Kelly, director of IBM Research, said of cognitive computing, a term the company uses to refer to artificial intelligence techniques related to Watson. The hope is that the Watson Business Group, a division aimed making its Jeopardy!-winning cognitive computing application more of a commercial success, will be able to answer more complicated questions in all sorts of industries, including health care, financial investment, and oil discovery; and that it will help IBM build a lucrative new computer-driven consulting business.

But Watson is still a work in progress. Some companies and researchers testing Watson systems have reported difficulties in adapting the technology to work with their data sets. "It's not taking off as quickly as they would like," says Robert Austin. "This is one of those areas where turning demos into real business value depends on the devils in the details. I think there's a bold new world coming, but not as fast as some people think." IBM needs software developers to embrace its vision and build services and apps that use its cognitive computing technology. In May of this year it announced that seven universities would offer computer science classes in cognitive computing and last month IBM revealed a list of partners that have developed applications by tapping into application programming interfaces that access versions of Watson running in the cloud. Big Blue said it will invest $1 billion into the Watson division including $100 million to fund startups developing cognitive apps. "I very much admire the end goal," says Boris Katz, adding that business pressures could encourage IBM's researchers to move more quickly than they would like. "If the management is patient, they will really go far."

Comments

GOFAI doesn't work

[kruach aum]

no matter how much processor power you bolt onto it, Good Old Fashioned Artificial Intelligence does not scale easily to other problem domains, or even similar problem domains. We have known this since at least the 70s. What's needed for better AI is a conceptual breakthrough, not increasingly powerful hardware and software and things that pretend to not be GOFAI but really are. Deep learning looks promising imo, but that also still has a long way to go.

The Fix

[s.petry]

IBM has a fix, but I doubt very seriously they would consider it. The same problem plaguing IBM also plagued EDS, CSC, HP, Sun, SGI, and damn this list could get really long so I'll stop.

IBM's problem is that it forgot what made it a huge company. Rather, they remembered but said "F$^& it" and went to the "Lets make as much profit as possible and who cares about the customer business model.

All of the companies above with the exception of CSC are shells of what they used to be (outside of obviously IBM). CSC is excluded past here, as they are only on the brink of catastrophe, and quite collapsing yet... but close. Companies like IBM make money by customizing services for customers, and having a reliable competent staff on hand to do just that. All of these companies laid off the people that visited sites and made shit work. IBM not only sold off their PC and Laptop businesses, but their Global Services which was the bread and butter for IBM. Project work is hard, and you can't forecast with simple algorithms. IBM started outsourced a few things overseas for the same 500.00/hr rate and cancelled everything else, laying off what.. 80,000 people from their Global Services business? (memory, I don't feel like digging at the moment). All to make some executives big fat bonus checks and stock holders happy with easy to predict revenue (even if lower). Technical people that made shit work and made customers happy were considered not just overhead, but wasteful. IBM's attitude has become "if you don't like what we give you in the box, too bad.

So there you have it, there is the fix to IBM. Get Global Services back and get technical people into customers offices to make shit work for them. IBM would have to kiss a lot of ass and probably reduce rates for a while to gain customer confidence again, but possible. It's too late for Sun, SGI, EDS, DEC, and many others. IBM is big enough to revamp. I seriously doubt they will however, because they would have to reinvest in all of the people they have shit on for about a decade. That would cost management bonuses, and the executive management in IBM today is all about the big fat bonus checks.

Potential Breakthroughs in AI

[catchblue22]

Neurons can typically fire at a rate of 250Hz. There are about 100 billion neurons in a typical human brain. These neurons are networked in an extremely complicated and changeable parallel network. This network of neurons can be powered for reasonably long time with the energy contained in a bowl of oatmeal. Surely we will at some point be able to create a similar device, and one that doesn't require most of the world's computing power to run.

I suspect the breakthrough will come with a new computing paradigm, one that is based on massive parallelism. Perhaps it will consist of a silicon based device that mimics the network and function of neurons. I suspect it will be based on probabilistic computing, similar to how our own brains work. It will be taught rather than programmed. Perhaps there will be more states than merely 0 and 1.

I think that this is coming, because our brains are already doing it. And with incredible efficiency. Once we saw birds fly, and so we tried to do it ourselves. Eventually we figured it out. I think it will be the same with AI. We will copy nature, learn its principles, and then we will create our own version. And in doing so, I suspect our ideas of what intelligence is will fundamentally change.

No.

[phantomfive]

IBM used to be a company based on three things, in this order:

1) Keep customers happy
2) Keep employees happy.
3) Keep stockholders happy

Somewhere along the way, they've forgotten about #1 and #2, which means #3 will fail eventually. Will Watson save IBM? No, of course not. If IBM wants to turn around, they need to focus on making their customers happy. How long have they let the problems in Lotus Notes fester? Why do they think customers have left Lotus Notes for any alternative they could find? If they'd focused on fixing the things that annoy customers, it could be a really great product by now. But they didn't, and it's not. That's why IBM will die if they don't change.