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back to article Human overlord Watson lives in the 'clouds' now, in a $1bn cognition unit. Don't be afraid

IBM has said that it wants to throw more than a billion dollars at powerful cognition overlord and Jeopardy!-playing human crusher Watson... so that the supercomputer can become a new business unit. The Watson Group will be headed up by Big Blue's former senior veep of software solutions Michael Rhodin and will try to milk …

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  1. Andrew Newstead

    I may have made some bad decisions recently...

    I hear there's a spacecraft bound for Jupiter needing a computer..

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    1. Anonymous Coward
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      Anonymous Coward

      Re: I may have made some bad decisions recently...

      I'm sorry, that post can serve no further purpose. Goodbye.

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      1. Euripides Pants
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        Re: I may have made some bad decisions recently...

        Your post is false data. Therefore I shall ignore you.

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    2. MyffyW Silver badge
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      Re: I may have made some bad decisions recently...

      Daisy, daisy....

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  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Think of all the call centers worldwide that will go out of business if they can get Watson spooled up. All he will need is someone to tweak his accent to sound like it comes from Mumbai.

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    1. Anonymous Coward
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      Anonymous Coward

      You don't need a supercomputer to run through the predefined script. The IT Crowd came just as close with the automatic tape-deck: "Are you sure it's plugged in?"

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      1. T. F. M. Reader
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        I can imagine "the war of the Watsons" as a direct continuation of "automatic attendant abuse" (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/01/27/bofh_2006_episdoe_4/) by other means.

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  3. Rol

    Voice activated sense analysis

    Or VASA for short.

    Your little gadget, pc, etc, has a voice recognition program running, with a library of commands it can instantly recognise. Once the instructions get unintelligible to your local machine it passes the phrase/sentence to Watson, which then passes back something your machine can work with.

    eg. "Where on Earth are my car keys?" Watson replies, "Find car keys" PC then looks through its recent NSA surveillance videos and says "where you left them"

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  4. Don Jefe

    I'm only interested if they leave the Urban Dictionary plugin integrated. If the computer can't give you good answers then hilarious answers will suffice.

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    1. Sandtitz Silver badge
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      Watson needs a voice synth with jive module.

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  5. John Sturdy
    Headmaster

    The firm claims it's 24 times faster and has seen a 2,400 per cent improvement in its performance.

    Would it ask the the firm to explain the distinction between speed and performance?

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    1. Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
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      Paris Hilton

      Speed: How fast you get there

      Performance: How much not tired you are when you get there

      Paris, because, you know.

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    2. Al Black
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      24 times faster

      Just a heads up for you: 24 times faster is exactly the same as 2400% faster.

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  6. John G Imrie

    Watson IS the virus. It's the reason everything's falling apart!

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  7. Ian Michael Gumby
    Terminator

    Watson is 1/4th the computer it once was.

    3 yrs ago Watson beat Jeopardy players.

    3 years is 2 cycles of Moore's law. A computer today built with today's parts should be 4 times as fast as Watson just in terms of CPU hardware. Add in SSD over spinning iron... and you remove some of the latency.

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    1. Suricou Raven
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      Re: Watson is 1/4th the computer it once was.

      Assuming the same algorithms. AI, even 'good enough for a first-line at a call center' AI as Watson is intended to be, is very hard. Experts have devoted their career to trying to advance the field. The slowdown you notice probably means they sacrificed some speed in order to improve accuracy of answers.

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    2. Anonymous Coward
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      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Watson is 1/4th the computer it once was.

      Did you read the bit where it said that Watson now runs in a fraction of the hardware, making it realistically affordable for a much wider range of applications?

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  8. Solmyr ibn Wali Barad
    Terminator

    Obligatory part

    I, for one, welcome our new jeopardy-inducing^W playing overlords.

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  9. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Although the supercomputer fired up the public's imagination with its Jeopardy!-winning antics, IBM has appeared to struggle to find a way to turn the technology into a business.

    I'm assuming they didn't try "Watson - What would be a good business plan for a computer which can search through data very quickly, and answer questions with natural language responses?"

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    1. DiViDeD
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      As a Frederic Brown fan, I'm waiting for the day when some eejit asks "Watson, is there a God?"

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      1. Anonymous Coward
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        Anonymous Coward

        Or from and Asimov short story "The Last Question":

        How can the net amount of entropy of the universe be massively decreased?

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  10. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    "The Watson Group will be headed up by Big Blue's former senior veep of software solutions Michael Rhodin".

    If Watson were as good as it's cracked up to be, surely it would be running the show - not some naive ignorant meat suit.

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