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It's double whammy for the Watson stuff, because not only did IBM lose track with AI, they also had that whole cloud thing whoosh by them. So not only do you have marketing telling outrageous lies about the abilities of their AI systems, they're also exaggerating the cloud angle where Watson is a cornerstone.


Possibly the most outrageous lie was calling it AI in the first place.

Watson is a $@#% amazing information retrieval system. Information retrieval is only a small part of what people think of when they think, "AI".


Well, what people think of when they hear "AI" is generally pretty different from what academics mean when they say "AI" anyways.


> amazing information retrieval system

Which I imagine still has lots of value on it's own for large, complicated data sets.


Yep. But if your marketing and product management are all focused on selling AI instead of IR, then they're not really working toward finding a way to deliver the IR value they have to the people who need it.

I'd actually like to give Watson a spin for an IR problem I'm looking at, but, thanks to their hype machine being set to overdrive, they've got the thing priced in the "The Bold Leaders of the Future Creating a Bright New Tomorrow Full of People in Glasses Staring Wistfully Toward the Right Edge of the Photograph, While Blue Curvy Streaks Wave Through the Background and Random Zeroes and Ones Float Around Their Heads" tier. Sadly, I've only got a "businesses solving business problems" sized budget.


What is your use case and what are the alternatives you're considering? I'm trying to understand what to imagine here.


IBM BlueMix didn't have the Watson IR tech you were looking for?


Watson is a thing that is good at Jeopardy. Therefore it is not AI. AI is only things that a computer can not do. Nothing that exists is ever AI


Jeopardy is an information retrieval problem in a game show format, with the minor twist that the query is phrased as a declarative sentence and the response is phrased as an interrogative one.

AI is not simply things that a computer can't do yet. But I think most of people who aren't currently trying to sell a piece of software would expect AI to include some things that you don't need to do to play Jeopardy. I'd want to see general-purpose pattern recognition, for example.


IBM actually has a cloud, but they make it so difficult to buy that it’s not really worth it.




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