What Ever Happened to IBM’s Watson?
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/16/technology/what-ever-happened-to-ibms-watson.html?referringSource=articleShare
13 replies (most recent on top)
@fkz+1bR8hsFa Failed reading comprehension in primary school. Obviously, “ibm cloud” sucks! Amazon cloud is great!
Entire article quoted here --
https://www.reddit.com/r/newIBM/comments/olyp7v/what_ever_happened_to_ibms_watson/
What ibm defines as AI customer is not AI customer for other IT companies. Customer qualification is inaccurate
@vyr+1bR8hsFa meant "IBM" cloud sucks... easy guess
“ IBM says. Some of the big customers are in health, like Anthem, a large insurer, which uses Watson Assistant to automate customer inquiries.”
You do know that all a “bot” is basically an interactive FAQ. There’s no magic there and you sure as h3ll don’t need watson for it.
AI is a joke. It just farms data and bangs it against a flow-chart and sp-t something out. Companies use it to avoid you talking to a human being. At IBM, it's used so the client can self help themselves or for support looking for a simple action plan. That's okay for a GUI question, but not so much for break/fix. Remember 30 years ago when we said we'll send the pizza guy to go onsite and replace a part? RAS will have the correct action plan. We all know how well that went.
Skip to the end of the article. The main point in the end is that it's starting to do well.
"It is early for A.I. in the corporate market, he said, the market opportunity will be huge and the key at this stage is to hasten adoption of the Watson software offerings.
IBM says it has 40,000 Watson customers across 20 industries worldwide, more than double the number four years ago. Watson products and services are being used 140 million times a month, compared with a monthly rate of about 10 million two years ago, IBM says. Some of the big customers are in health, like Anthem, a large insurer, which uses Watson Assistant to automate customer inquiries.
“Adoption is accelerating,” Mr. Thomas said."
@vyr+1bR8hsFa, Cloud sucks? Uhhh, wat? Who are you, Sam Palmisano?
@dcy+1bR8hsFa, IBM has plenty of data. Most of the world's financial data still runs on mainframe. They also own the Weather, and all the Weather Data on the planet (almost). Are you talking about social media data? Most data from Twitter and the likes is free for anyone to nab and do whatever model training they want with it. As for Amazon, they're the walmart of tech. Apple doesn't give a dang about cloud or AI for the most part so they're not even in the same market. I suggest don't throw the top 5 or 6 companies into the same p-t and say they all do the same thing.
What happened to Watson is the problem with ibm all across the company. The technology sucks! Cloud sucks. Systems sucks. Etc. Etc.
IBM showed the world what was possible, but will never be able to catch up. The victory goes to the companies that have the big data - Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Twitter, Apple, Netflix - they can train and customize their AI on oceans of data that IBM will never have access to.
Trivia - the Watson Jeopardy set exhibit was displayed at the Computer History Museum in Silicon Valley to great fanfare in 2013.
https://computerhistory.org/press-releases/ibm-watson/
However, the exhibit was quietly removed years ago.
That says it all.
Enjoyed this article - you might need an NYT subscription to open it.
IBM management/executive is a culture of syncophants - that's how these "all in" bets are made.
Watson may have beat Ken Jennings.. watch the whole show.. major geography flaw on Toronto.. how can that cure AI?
Cut to a Watson session at ibms vegas-customer show.. all I could think about was liability and malpractice insurance (topics not raised or addressed)
Even more amazing is exec retrospect s that the objectives were good (who can argue with curing cancer) but not realistic.. im sorry.. that's you're f**king job to spot that and speak up.. oops sorry.. culture of syncophants
I've seen other divisions collapse to a lab leader (vs sales).. who ultimately wokes up to the messaging BS (except maybe AK takes cloud and AI personal) and realizes what Gerstner did.. the only assets are the mframe, and dwindling exec relationships
There is a long road of failed "Watsons".. IP and mframe had kept $$ in the bank.