Big Data Marketing


IBM Watson. A name that is quickly becoming recognized by more and more people thanks to an onslaught of media attention. This article about Watson in Medicine currently has 17,000+ shares. A cute store about Project Havyn made its way around the web a few months back. The stories that caught my attention were the ones about Cyber Security.

The reason that Watson became an interest of mine is that I was working at Recorded Future at the time whose product is very similar but way better. Watson advertises consuming a million documents - most of which have to be manually picked and fed in (Manual Feeding). Recorded Future is an automated system that pulls documents from all over the Internet and consumes them. And while Watson seems like this magical being, Recorded Future is a straightforward web application. If this is the case, why is Watson so popular?

Yes - Watson does some amazing stuff leveraging cutting edge techniques in machine learning and natural language processing, but is it useful enough at this point in time to warrant the amount of attention that it is receiving? There are other companies and organizations working on projects as cool, if not more so, than Watson but are unknown to most. Is the popularity of Watson giving the public a false idea of what AI is? Is it having an impact on the progress of AI development?

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