I worked at IBM Watson as one of the early engineers when they first started commercializing the product. It was a fucking joke - Ginni Rometty would go up on stage and said that Watson can help diagnose cancer from CT scans and we would just look at each other and be like "Dude, Watson is just a glorified Lucene index, wtf is she talking about." They started selling Watson as the end-all for everything from cancer diagnosis to customer service chat - they even had a stupid Watson Chef thing at SXSW one year - but none of that used the original Watson codebase - it was all built from the ground up and lots of it was just simple logistic regression
> they even had a stupid Watson chef thing at SXSW one year
I loved Chef Watson, am sad that it's gone, and would pay a small amount for renewed access.
It wasn't "smart", and its recommendations needed to be tempered with human understanding, but I wound up with some great recipes that I wouldn't have thought of otherwise.
I think the best was goat milk mac & cheese with radishes and red miso.
The funniest was when it told me to remove the connective tissue from tofu.
I worked on Chef Watson and was part of the team at SXSW. One of the most amusing parts was how much it loved bacon. This was because bacon could be sweet, savory, salty, and fatty - it all depended on how you cooked it. A big part of the way that Chef Watson created recipes was by connecting flavors together. There was a while when it didn’t record why it had included an ingredient - so bacon would be brought originally because it can be sweet, but then it would immediately bridge to the fatty flavor. Fun times indeed.
I worked for IBM (non-Watson) not too many years ago and this cracks me up because I heard the same from Watson employees I spoke with. And it wasn't just Watson that Ginni talked fluff about. I swear every word that came out of her mouth was a combination of fluff and technical buzz words. We all used to sit around a workstation when she would give her monthly talks and ask one another what she was talking about, because none of us had a clue. IBM seems to encourage that fluffy, buzz word exec talk, and to be honest if I hear someone talk like this now my mind turns off.
One of my favorite past-times is talking with loyal IBM employees and seeing if they can tell me what Watson is, does, or how to use it. Ginni is laughing all the way to the bank at this point so I guess the joke's on us.
