> Watson is the most extreme blue sky research out there
Do you mean it is the most blue sky research being done in the field of AI by large companies? Even if it was closest to blue sky research being done in machine learning by large tech companies, that really doesn't automatically mean that it is blue sky research.
> It happens to have a customer base that intersects with IBM's current base
The definition of blue sky research is "research without any clear path to a product". It isn't diminishing the importance of research to say that it is blue sky (in fact many people would argue the opposite). Watson was already being touted for an actual product launch by the time that it was on Jeopardy.
I don't know that Google has too much blue sky research itself. I guess maybe something that Kurzweil is up to, have they released anything about him?
I guess probably anything that Hinton was hired for which is more fundamental neural network research, maybe the cat recognizing neural network research they did on youtube video?
Do you mean it is the most blue sky research being done in the field of AI by large companies? Even if it was closest to blue sky research being done in machine learning by large tech companies, that really doesn't automatically mean that it is blue sky research.
> It happens to have a customer base that intersects with IBM's current base
The definition of blue sky research is "research without any clear path to a product". It isn't diminishing the importance of research to say that it is blue sky (in fact many people would argue the opposite). Watson was already being touted for an actual product launch by the time that it was on Jeopardy.