Does Watson Have the Answer To Big Blue's Uncertain Future? 67
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."
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."
lay off us workers and for any thing that needs to (Score:1)
lay off us workers and for any thing that needs to be done hear import temps at $1.23 HR with no OT pay.
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Yeah but now they'll be able to outsource Indian offshore workers to AI workers running on an IBM mainframe!
Well? (Score:3, Funny)
Does Watson Have the Answer To Big Blue's Uncertain Future?
Did you ask it?
Potential Breakthroughs in AI (Score:5, Insightful)
Neurons can typically fire at a rate of 250Hz [physiologyweb.com]. 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.
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For starters, look up how many neurons you can simulate with a single CPU. Then, calculate how many fibers you need for the comms bandwidth.
There is the problem...I think that CPU's are the wrong tool. The problem needs to be re-framed. Perhaps we need synthetic neurons. Then we will need precisely one synthetic neuron to simulate a real one. I know...easier said than done. But we do know the basics of neuron function. Why can't we make a single electronic element that does something very similar?
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What is the point of having a nuclear power station for 5 billion dollars emulating a brain if you can make one for something like 200k by inseminating a real WIFE ? And then schooling the offspring etc.
If we can make a human level brain, then we can make something much smarter as well.
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What is the point of having a nuclear power station for 5 billion dollars emulating a brain if you can make one for something like 200k by inseminating a real WIFE ?
Nice male-centric view you've got there.
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Our brains are based upon probabilistic computing? Not doubting it since I don't know enough of the "real" neuron details. Just noting it as ironic given how bad we are at assessing risk.
Perhaps I am not using the correct terminology. And I am not an expert...this isn't really my field. But I have seen neural network simulations which, for example recognize handwriting. You show the program many variations on the letter F, and the computer then learns to take symbols that look like the letter F and put them into that group. One can imagine that the brain is made up of many such processes. It certainly sounds like the way that I learned. See a spoon, see mommy using it to feed me, see
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I forgot to mention...what I describe above is called learning by induction. Which is a form of probabilistic learning.
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My answer to all of that is GIGO, garbage in garbage out. We already have a prime example of cognitive computing in the shared human science of planetary climate. We it produces answers that rich and greedy don't like they ignore it and even worse start feeding in more and more lies into the system in order to try to get the answers they want rather than the truth. I'll bet that any cognitive computer created by humanity will go insane as a result of the garbage being fed into it and produce nothing but ga
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Well, I doubt we will ever be near a human brain. The number of synpases a single neuron can do is already beyond everything you can imagine, even massively parallel or whatever else. Also, I don't believe the goal is to mimick the human brain anyway. We have no idea how knowledge is represented in a human brain. An our planes do not copy the nature at all, they are inspired by it, but in no way we are near to copy a bird's flight.
There is a danger to let people think we will mimick the human brain while we
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Old school.
Semiconductors are so pre-google.
The future is in quantum computing via entanglement with a combination of silo systems working in parallel with other silo systems.
Artificial intelligence will be when a computer weeps when its Facebook page is taken down.
Japan tried this with the 5th Generation Computing (Score:1)
You can't schedule a scientific breakthrough. Japan tried that with the 5th Generation Computing project back in the 80's. The goal was similar, to use logic programming AI techniques for knowledge information processing.
The project did not achieve any breakthroughs.
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The problem is that we know what syntax is. And we know what semantic is. However, we do not know what real pragmatics are. All we do in modeling of information is inserting human "knowledge" and understanding into a computer system. Then the system is able to reason about that, but it cannot go beyond it.
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Get rid of the stocks of companies that decide to bank on research. Research makes a company cool, not profitable. It's where they gamble, for those who can afford it, but not where they succeed.
No question and no answer (Score:2)
Watson is too small to deliver the answer. Thankfully we already know the answer is 42. Maybe "he" is able to determine the question, as "he" is quite good at jeopardy.
I think there is a world market... (Score:4, Funny)
I think there is a world market for maybe five Watsons.
GOFAI doesn't work (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Re:GOFAI doesn't work (Score:5, Interesting)
The basic reason there cannot be a conceptual breakthrough is because intelligence is not anything in particular. It is just a level of proficiency in a bunch of various areas, and the integration between them. Just a bunch of different hacks.
The Fix (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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You CAN make out-of-the-box-nicely-working RDBMSs, operating systems and the like. See MSFT Co.
BUT - that also requires seasoned engineers, well paid, very often white and having a family. You cannot do this with dirt-cheap, inexperienced, quickly leaving indian labour.
Alternatively, you can make less nicely working stuff like DB/2 and have experienced, seasoned, well-paid engineers making it work on the customer's site.
If you want to skip the well-paid, seasoned, white guy you are going to fail. RIGHTLY SO
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The skin color of the engineers doesn't matter. The big difference here is "well paid" and "dirt-cheap". There's plenty of good Indian software people (there's also a whole lot of bad ones; India's a very big place, and quality of lots of stuff is highly uneven). However, nobody I've seen outsources to India thinking "I'll get the good ones and pay them well," but rather "Look how cheap they are!".
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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.
I would suggest that the difficult part would be getting good employees back again.
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Broadly speaking, I agree, but you're overthinking it: all those companies failed or were significantly crippled because of a simple issue: corporate psychopaty. People in top positions including and especially CxOs, looking after their own interest at the expense of everybody else's. In previous years you had executives that tried to manage their companies for a long-term success. Nowadays, most executives (of large publicly traded companies) are just parasites. But even parasites don't try to kill their
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I'm not sure I was not over thinking, seems like we agree on the Executive part. I just put half the blame on the share holders who put specific executives in place. Package solutions are predictable. I.E. Buy a cloud host for X dollars a month. Revenue is based on Y units of X dollars, stock holders and executives love this because they don't have to think. Even better, you plug this into a front end and no more human involvement is needed, so it's seen as pure profit. The only variable in the equat
No (Score:1)
No.
Watson's first app: replace the CEO (Score:2)
No. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
All AS IT SHOULD BE (Score:1)
The CEOs of IBM have defecated onto their best engineers and essentially told the world "we can replace this white guy with a decent salary with a random guy from a developing country at the cheapest rates. No need for experienced masters of the trade".
Let them crash and burn, this will be REQUIRED to warn the other M.B.A. muppets and the general 1%.
Watson, the pinnacle of Self-Medication... (Score:2)
Magic 8-Ball Says: (Score:2)
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"Outlook not so good."
Outlook is a Microsoft product. This is an article about IBM, so the 8-ball would have to say "Lotus Notes not so good."
The next big thing(s) (Score:3)
Watson? No. (Score:1)
There's no business there. I work in intel/analytics, and I've been to an IBM Watson demo/presentation/workshop.
It sounds great in their glossies, but what it actually does is so limited it was of no value to us.
Watson is too human to be real (Score:1)
Watson won on Jeopardy! by buzzing at the first moment possible (when Alex finished reading the "answer") whether or not it knew the answer, and then using the seven seconds allotted to do the lookup. That's a tactic humans just don't do, and it was a team of researchers copying the Google results into a question not something the computers could finish on their own. Maybe Slashdot should program a Cover It Live room to play against it and Ken Jennings/Brad Rutter to see how this works.
HAL9000 says, "Thanks, Dave" (Score:1)
Fire all non executives reincorporate in Kuwait (Score:1)
that's pretty much the plan.
"Watson" is no one thing (Score:2)
In IBM "Watson" appears to just be a vacuous marketing term for anything vaguely related to Artificial Intelligence. Any technical details are very sparse.
Sure there was the very clever program that won Jeopardy!. But then IBM is saying that they want to use "Watson" for medical diagnosis. That is about as different a problem as you can get. And if the term "Cognative Computing" means anything at all it suggests the use of perceptron networks, which are not generally used for either the Jeopardy Watson
Does it? No. (Score:1)