Quote:
Originally Posted by MarchHare
IBM spent millions of dollars over four years and dedicated some of their top computer scientists to this project. They didn't make that kind of investment just for the PR of appearing on a prime time game show.
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IBM's R&D budget is in the 6 billion dollar area. You are right - they didn't spend millions of dollars on this just for PR, they also did it because its as cost effective as any other national ad campaign.
What Watson does is nothing new - question answering (QA) systems are out there and in use now. Take a look at Wolfram Alpha as an example.
I stand by what I said - all IBM demonstrated was they could build a really big, really high performing one using commodity hardware. It's the plumbing that is the news here - that systems this large and parallel are feasible using current tech. That's the sales pitch for these other systems you are talking about, like medical.
Edit: I'm no disparaging what the Watson team accomplished. Just saying its not as revolutionary as some here are claiming. It's just the biggest public example of a QA system most people have seen.