formeribmer | 4 years ago | on: IBM’s Watson Health is sold off in parts
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