IBM To Offer Watson Services In the Cloud

jfruh writes "Have you ever wanted to write code for Watson, IBM's Jeopardy-winning supercomputer? Well, now you can, sort of. Big Blue has created a standardized server that runs Watson's unique learning and language-recognition software, and will be selling developers access to these boxes as a cloud-based service. No pricing has been announced yet."

Correction

[Anonymous Coward]

"IBM To Offer Watson Services Via the internet"

"Have you ever wanted to write code for Watson, IBM's Jeopardy-winning supercomputer? Well, now you can, sort of. Big Blue has created a standardized server that runs Watson's unique learning and language-recognition software, and will be selling developers access to these boxes over the internet. No pricing has been announced yet."

Brought to you by the Association To Remove That Stupid Buzzword "THE CLOUD" and replace it with its more precise and simple meaning: "The internet"/"server"/etc.

Watson sold as Watson

[blue_adept]

The fact that IBM is selling Watson as Watson just goes to show that Watson didn't in fact lead to anything interesting, in terms of general purpose AI. I always considered Watson to be Eliza on steroids, even in the midst of the marketing hype, and so far my prediction seems to be true. There was a lot of noise initially about how Watson was being sent to medical school, was going to be plugged into medical databases, etc etc. So far, from what I can tell, Watson is an expert system, just like Deep Blue -- good at the narrow problem it tries to solve, but not a good model for human cognition or language processing per se.

And the old is new again...

[QuietLagoon]

Am I the only person here who remembers buying time on IBM's mainframes back in the day? OK, so the Internet has replaced IBM SNA, and the mainframe is now called The Cloud.

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So, the PC revolution lasted 30 years, and now we're back to where we were in 1983.