<story><title>IBM Watson Overpromised and Underdelivered on AI Health Care</title><url>https://spectrum.ieee.org/biomedical/diagnostics/how-ibm-watson-overpromised-and-underdelivered-on-ai-health-care</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>1e-9</author><text>To me, the main mistake was the series of commercials giving the strong impression that IBM already had this incredible Artificial General Intelligence that was indistinguishable from a highly intelligent human and was solving a myriad of difficult practical problems better than any expert. I suspect that most who were well-versed in AI felt the ads were disingenuous from the start.  I know I did.  I think the marketing campaign would have better served IBM had it laid out their commitment to achieve these things without sounding like they were already there.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>DebtDeflation</author><text>&amp;gt;To me, the main mistake was the series of commercials giving the strong impression that IBM already had this incredible Artificial General Intelligence&lt;p&gt;100% correct.  Had IBM marketed Watson for what it actually is - an enterprise version of Amazon Alexa or Google Assistant (which admittedly didn&amp;#x27;t even exist at the time) - they&amp;#x27;d be in a completely different spot.  Instead we got the Bob Dylan commercials (which under the covers was just speech to text, a hardcoded dialog tree, and text to speech) and all the &amp;quot;Watson is curing cancer&amp;quot; nonsense (which under the covers was just a rules engine sitting on top of a search engine intended to provide customized treatment plans).  The actual technology works, but it&amp;#x27;s an NLP platform for building chatbots and search engines (think intent classifier, relevancy ranker, named entity&amp;#x2F;semantic relationship&amp;#x2F;sentiment annotators) not the AGI that it was marketed as.</text></comment>
<story><title>IBM Watson Overpromised and Underdelivered on AI Health Care</title><url>https://spectrum.ieee.org/biomedical/diagnostics/how-ibm-watson-overpromised-and-underdelivered-on-ai-health-care</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>1e-9</author><text>To me, the main mistake was the series of commercials giving the strong impression that IBM already had this incredible Artificial General Intelligence that was indistinguishable from a highly intelligent human and was solving a myriad of difficult practical problems better than any expert. I suspect that most who were well-versed in AI felt the ads were disingenuous from the start.  I know I did.  I think the marketing campaign would have better served IBM had it laid out their commitment to achieve these things without sounding like they were already there.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>evrydayhustling</author><text>The commercials are the public-facing tip of a much larger iceburg of enterprise-scale sales and marketing.  Big institutions gave Watson a shot because they created a machine that maximized FOMO with intriguing demos, reduced risk with the &amp;quot;nobody gets fired for buying IBM effect&amp;quot;, and perhaps most importantly pitches projects that were large enough to move the needle and make the career of a high level administrator.&lt;p&gt;When you realize how much positioning is required for large scale sales, you can start to understand why the same company might not have the feedback loops in place to build a product.</text></comment>