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Comment by ericol

8 days ago

> Ok, so does anyone remember 'Watson'? It was the chatgpt before chatgpt. they built it in house

I do. I remember going to a chat once where they wanted to get people on-board in using it. It was 90 minutes of hot air. They "showed" how Watson worked and how to implement things, and I think every single person in the room knew they were full of it. Imagine we were all engineers and there were no questions at the end.

Comparing Watson to LLMs is like comparing a rock to an AIM-9 Sidewinder.

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ericol

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paxys  8 days ago

Watson was nothing like ChatGPT. The first iteration was a system specifically built to play Jeopardy. It did some neat stuff with NLP and information retrieval, but it was all still last generation AI/ML technology. It then evolved into a brand that IBM used to sell its consulting services. The product itself was a massive failure because it had no real applications and was too weak as a general purpose chat bot.

  • ericol  7 days ago

    I had no idea about what Watson was initially meant to solve.

    I do remember they tried to sell it - at least in the meeting I went - as a general purpose chatbot.

    I did try briefly to understand how to use it, but the documentation was horrendous (As in, "totally devoid of any technical information")

    • ethbr1  7 days ago

      Watson was intended to solve fuzzy optimization problems.

      Unfortunately, the way it solved fuzzy was 'engineer the problem to fit Watson, then engineer the output to be usable.'

      Which required every project to be a huge custom implementation lift. Similar to early Palantir.

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