Singularity Weblog

I'm quite late to this thread, but I worked on Watson very briefly (not on the core development, but overall system performance improvements).

I think there's a major misunderstanding of Watson which isn't helped by IBM's Marketing efforts. IBM Marketing has been slapping the "Cognitive" label on everything and is creating unrealistic expectations.

The Jeopardy playing Watson (DeepQA pipeline) was a landmark success at Information Retrieval, its architecture is built largely on Apache UIMA and Lucene with proprietary code for scaling out (performance) and filtering & ranking. I'm not an expert on IR so I won't comment further. This is very different from Neural Nets that are all the rage in ML today.

I'd like to point the following links from David Ferrucci [1] the original architect of Watson and this technical publication at aaai.org [2].

The DeepQA pipeline wasn't fluff, the intention was to take this question-answer pipeline and apply it to other verticals such as Law and Medicine, essentially replace the Jeopardy playing Watson's corpus of Wikipedia, Britannica etc... with Legal and Medical equivalents.

Given its runaway PR success, the Watson brand was applied to many other areas which haven't been successful but I'd like to point out what the original product was here.

[1] https://www.singularityweblog.com/david-ferrucci-on-singularity-1-on-1-pursue-the-big-challenges/
[2] https://www.aaai.org/Magazine/Watson/watson.php

Something that you might find interesting:

There are two basic lines of thought here, the hard-electron AI school of thought that pushes the emergent hypothesis and the "Consciousness is not Computation" school of thought that accepts that Mind is Computation but states that Consciousness is something else.

Tip: the AI hypothesis does NOT explain nor predicts the thing that a Paramesium can do.

https://www.singularityweblog.com/stuart-hameroff-quantum-consciousness/