It seems Watson was founded on the false premise that lots of hand coded things could be called an “AI”. It’s the victim of its own winter, because it was never going to live up to its own hype.

I couldn't have put it better myself.

Participating in Jeopardy was quite an achievement, but to extrapolate that system and selling it as a "solve all" is to over promise.

To be fair, it did more than participate. It dominated.

Yeah I kinda remember reading it being accused of being vaporware. Then I googled "Watson vaporware" and got the following [1]. Definitely think they are in that part of the hype cycle.

[1] https://www.technologyreview.com/s/607965/a-reality-check-fo...

edit: "trough of disillusionment" is what I was looking for

Interesting article, but I'd bet a big part of the reason physicians don't know it's that do much is dependent upon information that lives "out of the system".

How much time will a patient spend on rehab, and will they actually perform the exercises effectively? What's their diet like, not just calories in but in terms of individual nutrients? How active is their lifestyle?

Recovery time seems like something that should be knowable by educated doctors, but the best poker player in the world can't tell you what card is coming up on the river.

Do you imagine that other, more successful "AI" services from large companies do not involve a lot of hand-coded things?

Yes. Well, at the very least, they don't involve only hand-coded things.

The ones that aren't hand-coded tend to act poorly, or racist, or worst.

Interesting. Do you have some references about this 'hand coded things' ?

"Hand-coded" may be an exaggeration, depending on your field.

ML systems need good training data (where "good" might mean "extremely voluminous") and careful tweaking of parameters. I think an ML expert would call a system where a substantial amount of time is spent here "hand-coded".

This isn't really anything to do with machine learning, and just IBM's inability to bring innovation to market (particularly in industry solutions.)

What would you expect from a company run like a hedge fund by a bunch of marketing hacks? Half the original Watson research fellows and executives have left to start their own companies, having seen the writing on the wall years ago.

My friend who survived the layoffs indicated that this was due to in large part changes in the political/regulatory landscape that made it so the companies they were working with would no longer require the features that IBM was providing.

What changed?

Watson could never really deliver on the AI healthcare integration and diagnostic support. Basically it became a status symbol for hospitals to have, but it was dead weight. https://www.statnews.com/2017/09/05/watson-ibm-cancer/