IBM Watson: More Promises after Previous Promises. Will IBM Deliver This Time?

December 23, 2020

Wow, I had almost forgotten that IBM Watson was going to be a $1 billion business back in 2014. How quickly some forget that Lucene, home brew code, and acquisitions blended with science fiction? In 2017, the former Big Blue executive said in the Harvard Business Review:

“Watson will touch one billion people by the end of this year.”

Touch is not generate $1 billion and more in sustainable revenues. Nope, Watson failed in cancer, did zippo to fight Covid, and did create some memorable full page ads like the weird chemical structure thing in 2015:

Yeah, building blocks of cognitive software.

“IBM Sets Its NLP Ambitions High With New Capabilities In Watson” explains that IBM is making progress. Note this statement:

While recent announcements by IBM focus around language, explainability, and workplace automation, the update around its language capabilities include reading comprehension, FAQ extraction and improving interactions in Watson Assistant. All these products aim to bring resilience, productivity and value for enterprises.

I like the explainability. Why not explain why the supercomputer Covid drug analysis did not generate a usable output, defaulting to a long list of “maybe these will work drugs” for humans to figure out what would work and what would not. Helpful in a time of crisis.

I don’t want to dwell on the implications that IBM Watson can now understand what humanoids write, particularly in short, cryptic WhatsApp messages about an illegal transaction. Let me quote one dollop of pink confectioner’s sugar paste:

…the company also announced a new intent classification model in IBM Watson Assistant, which is aimed at understanding an end user’s goal or intent behind engaging with the virtual assistant. It will then be used to train the systems accordingly while enabling greater accuracy in virtual assistants.

With a new president, I thought that the old IBM over hyped cognitive PR squibs had been retired for Ms. Rometty to oversee.

Wrong.

IBM is back in the hyperbole game. Let’s ask Watson. On second thought, nah.

Stephen E Arnold, December 23, 2020

Written by Stephen E. Arnold · Filed Under IBM Watson, Marketing, News

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Stephen E. Arnold monitors search, content processing, text mining and related topics from his high-tech nerve center in rural Kentucky. He tries to winnow the goose feathers from the giblets. He works with colleagues worldwide to make this Web log useful to those who want to go "beyond search". Contact him at sa [at] arnoldit.com. His Web site with additional information about search is arnoldit.com.