What Ever Happened to IBM’s Watson?

A better question might be “what happened to IBM?” Most ascribe competition and cloud to their decline, and those are primary factors, but the main reason for their inability to effectively compete was an incompetent CEO.<p>If you ever heard Ginni Rometty speak at an interview or conference, it’s clear she was in way over her head. She had no real understanding of anything AI or cloud, only that she needed to have AI and cloud and a ready offering for any new buzzword: blockchain, quantum computing, etc.<p>Under her watch, IBM acquired a cast of companies and tried to assemble a cloud computing arm with little time to do it. While some of Watson’s core tech was born in house much was bolt on acquisitions and hodgepodge marketing to push the narrative of a cohesive whole. The developers gave it a chance, and it mostly sucked. It wasn’t aimed at them after all—-it was aimed at their managers.

Watson was more of a Marketing name and concept than a product. The actual Watson tech, while not bad, was not a general purpose AI - all it did was assemble a bunch of inferences from a large corpus of text.<p>At the time, it was better at that than most systems, but it still produced a fair number of howlers when reviewed by humans. (I briefly looked at Watson as an alternative in evaluating technology for a new learning system some years ago.)

Not surprised to learn. Approx. 5 years ago we talked to the team at IBM to see if they are able to replicate and improve historical results we had achieved in trading our quantitative algorithm using our proprietary data set. Not only could they not improve it, they couldn&#x27;t even come close replicating the real results. They became so desperate that they were willing to send an entire team from the West Coast to the East Coast at their expense in order to identify the reason.

Former IBM employee here. When I joined IBM, Watson was all the rage. I made sure I got on a Watson team, which happened.<p>During the training phase, I quickly realised I was only learning things that were specific to Watson. I really hate the idea of learning things that are not transferable, so I quickly backed out. I dodged some blockchain projects as well, and got me on some good old full stack projects.<p>This comment is not meant as an answer to the article title (it&#x27;s behind a login&#x2F;pay wall, so I couldn&#x27;t read it), but I can imagine there are some other fantastic concepts out there that people are not willing to learn, because they have to think about their own career as well, not just about the success of their company.<p>The sad thing is: I was really good at the Watson thing. I just didn&#x27;t want to invest in it myself.

ex IBM intern here Watson is just a marketing name for a bunch of out of the box ai solutions, nothing too fancy, just chat bots, CV, and nlp apis and such it&#x27;s not bad either tbh imo

“We thought it would be easy, but it turned out to be really, really hard,” said Dr. Norman Sharpless, former head of the school’s cancer center, who is now the director of the National Cancer Institute. “We talked past each other for about a year.”<p>This happens in every organization, all the time.