Watson was mostly data science powered consulting pretending to have/be a product. They played heavily on the Jeopardy thing from a marking standpoint but what they were actually trying to sell was a hot mess.
I do consider this a good milestone in getting past the latest “AI” hype cycle and focusing on what actually works in that space. Sat through too many meetings with non-technical execs saying “what if we apply Watson here?”. The likes of McKinsey were pushing this stuff hard in what they were whispering into executives ears.
Well, Jeopardy was 4 years ago, so there that. If Watson were really believed, internally to IBM, to be as revolutionary as their marketing copy says, then I would expect to hear great triumphs of how IBM deployed Watson internally to, say, their sales department (which has got to have communication issues, given their size) and let it absorb information and then let it answer questions sales guys have about their products, turning them into believers.
The fact that we've seen little of Watson since Jeopardy makes me wonder if development hasn't stalled.
Watson that won Jeopardy was a fantastic advance in information retrieval. Google introduced the knowledge graph a year later, but domain (jeopardy) specific watson was terrific. The sad thing is that they got captured by PR rather than sense; a focus on customer service and my bet is that they could have disrupted Oracle/Seibel out of 75% of accounts.
IBM would be ridin' high!
BTW. This is still on the table for IBM if they are prepared to invest 18mths and focus gung ho on Oracle. In 18mths it won't be as "other players" will have moved, like Sauron, to hit this market.
Watson as a system was designed specifically to play Jeopardy. After the win it got a lot of global hype behind it and IBM's marketing and sales teams went into overdrive positioning it as some next generation intelligent AI that could help with generic business processes, analytics, medical diagnosis, legal briefs, customer service and every other business area under the sun. Instead, companies that bought into it got the same army of IBM offshore consultants to custom build half-assed solutions for them like before.
"Watson" is ultimately a marketing name for a sub-par IT consulting service, nothing more.
I suspect they could have done this, the technology certainly exists to read the screens and parse text from an image. They could also have tried to recognize when a human gives a wrong answer, like with the 20's question, and presumably the same logic used to play Jeopardy could interpret that statement and not give the same answer again. Watson took four years to develop and is the first of its kind. I suspect that something fancier never would have been finished, and too many features would have been a distraction from what IBM has actually accomplished.
Well, there is also the issue that Watson isn't an actual product. They used the jeopardy game to get brand recognition, but the customers don't get that. They get a team of contractors to hobble together whatever open source software or IBM products are out there to build you a super expensive "AI" product with what seems like a significant rate of failure (conjecture based on internet comments over numerous failures). So there was never anything for the public to interact with in the same manner as they can with ChatGPT.
I think it was fantastic, modern NLP could do much more (if put together with the cleverness of the Watson pipeline) and it's a pot of gold if IBM ever stop trying to apply it in healthcare and apply their brains to how it could work in customer service (for example).
Note : I am aware that there are "Watson" products that claim to be this - but they aren't because they are MBA's ideas of what the best route to selling crap to the unwary. If IBM had appointed someone with a clue and given them 10x the R&D budget for the gameshow to deliver a decent product I reckon they'd have got (at least) 100x. But... oh no.. promise 30x for 1x and get f-all.x^2
Watson had a ton of promise. I feel like IBM was desperate for revenue and to reinvent itself as a younger more innovative startup-type so the marketing and sales people took over what was VERY clearly an immature technology and tried to sell it everywhere.
They were good at that, but then the tech didn't meet the lofty expectations that had been created.
ChatGPT is entirely different - people understand instantly how useful it is and don't need marketing and sales people to peddle it.
I'm not sure You could call Watson an product at any given time in its history. The thing is that it was mainly a marketing stunt (the Jeopardy) and the technology behind it never was production ready and IBM was not able to turn it in anything reasembling real product. Sure they used the name, stamping anything that seems like AI with it (for example I remeber that there were some IBM Cloud services for sentiment analysis in text that were pushes inside this whole AI initiative).
But in the end it all seemd just like a gateway drug for IBM to shove some consulting teams down their clients throats.
Glad to see the broader market finally catching on to the marketing fluff train that was “Watson”.
On the one hand IBM did an impressive job tapping into people’s desire for “big data stuff” as a lot of uninformed folks talked a lot about “hey we should get that Watson thing.”
On the the other hand messing with peoples lives via a bogus cancer curing machine is some messed up stuff. These Watson boondoggle projects diverted a lot of good resources that could have gone towards legit value-add research.
The whole Jeopardy thing was really cool and amazing marketing, but as anyone who tries “Watson” knows the “Watson” IBM has been trying to sell is not the Jeopardy thing.
The team of developers I was on around 2014-2015 was asked to do some user experience testing sessions of a mobile app that was part of our company's partnership with IBM, which was using Watson to answer users' healthcare questions with a chat interface.
In short, we were not impressed, and basically said so in our feedback. Granted, that's just a few data points, and it was internal.
But besides that, the overall vibe I got from the very businessy, very not-engineer management behind the effort was that Watson was brilliant, as demonstrated on Jeopardy, and the main stuff left to do was some plumbing to connect our stuff to some of that Watson brilliance, and of course the business details of the partnership between the companies.
Watson won jeopardy by being an expert system with hand coded knowledge (their NLP parser was written in Prolog) and sophisticated QA text search. It wasn't a pure unsupervised/semi supervised deep learning model so it didn't generalize well to other domains like medicine despite it being hyped as a ML trailblazer.
The biggest problem with Watson was that it wasn't ever really a specific software. It was just kind of IBM's branding for machine learning consulting services.
The only real business problem is they didn’t program Watson to do what the Healthcare industry actually wants — make more $$$$$. The last thing they want is a computer that can actually diagnose people and provide effective solutions.
Watson didn't rise or fall, it was the centerpiece in IBM's marketing campaign, which worked for a while before they moved on. It never got beyond or matched the state of the art in anything, that wasn't the point, it got the name "Watson" on TV.
IBM wanted to prove that they employed smart people, so they hired some smart people and had them write a computer program to play Jeopardy. Did it matter that it had nothing to do with anything they were selling? Perhaps only IBM has those figures.
They could have built it over time to offer real assistance to knowledge workers with a real revenue stream.
But that would have required vision and foresight.
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