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Jefferies gives IBM Watson a Wall Street reality check

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Re: Jefferies gives IBM Watson a Wall Street reality check

#171

Post by agumonkey »

pgodzin wrote: post #135
agumonkey wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good to hear from someone working on W.Health. Just yesterday I saw the latest ad. on Watson which is now promising to help Basketball recruiters spot future stars .. which is quite a let down compared to the original promises of Watson. Anyways, any way for someone outside IBM to read about the health division effort and collaborations ?

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/607965/a-reality-check-fo... was a good recent review. The only IBM source I know of are the press releases announcing new collaborations: https://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/presskit/27297.wss

Thanks, that's a nice and long list. I still wish I could get a more technical view of what you're doing in medicine, are there conferences or symposium ?

Re: Jefferies gives IBM Watson a Wall Street reality check

#172

Post by RobLach »

daxfohl wrote: post #59

> and let’s be real, things would look much worse if Google, Microsoft and Facebook were added to this table Umm, so add them? And Nvidia, Intel, Baidu, Uber, Tesla? Anybody else? That single chart would actually be more interesting than the entirety of this article.

The techcrunch article says that but the Jefferies analyis mentions them in the notes for those charts saying they're compareable to Amazon.

Re: Jefferies gives IBM Watson a Wall Street reality check

#173

Post by pgodzin »

LoSboccacc wrote: post #168
pgodzin wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a SWE at Watson Health. What do you think was so absurd about it? It definitely didn't explain the constraints and limitations well enough (it won't diagnose any problem you can have), but for the cancer scenario the segment centered on, the Watson solution is indeed able to greatly assist doctors with a task that does not scale well for them.

After how much supervised learning driven by highly paid experts? Watson would be more credible if papers/people citing it's efficacy would start showing the actual queries and answers of the system without being constantly mediated by IBM oracles sitting between renaponses and their interpretations

Not sure what you're asking. The hospitals usually need to provided a lot of doctor-annotated data for training. But the custom solution is whatever the clients want it to be, not necessarily a question-answering system like Jeopardy that you seem to be asking about.

Re: Jefferies gives IBM Watson a Wall Street reality check

#174

Post by nl »

filereaper wrote: post #62
xienze wrote: post #25

> Jefferies pulls from an audit of a partnership between IBM Watson and MD Anderson as a case study for IBM’s broader problems scaling Watson. MD Anderson cut its ties with IBM after wasting $60 million on a Watson project that was ultimately deemed, “not ready for human investigational or clinical use.” Well, can't say I'm surprised. I used to work on that project a few years ago, basically the idea was that Watson…

So if I understand correctly, there was dirty/malformed data which was difficult to interpret, and when sent to a ML algorithm not tuned by a domain expert led to bad results. This applies to all ML work, why is Watson exempt from it? Conversely if this the canonical failure case, why's everyone so harsh on Watson?

Conversely if this the canonical failure case, why's everyone so harsh on Watson?

Because they keep claiming Watson can handle this kind of thing, they charged $60M for it, and failed.

That was $60M which could be spent on actual, real cancer research, or models which actually work.

For example, MSKCC[1] currently has a Kaggle competition[2] to do a roughly analogous task. The prize for that is $15,000, and they'll get something more useful for that than MD Anderson did for $60,000,000. Even taking into account it is probably costing MSKCC double the prize to have Kaggle run the competition it seems like IBM was ripping everyone off.

[1] http://mskcc.org

[2] https://www.kaggle.com/c/msk-redefining-cancer-treatment

Re: Jefferies gives IBM Watson a Wall Street reality check

#175

Post by [deleted] »

cirgue wrote: post #162
throwaway9980 wrote: post #3

IBM vastly over promises with their marketing. It is so frustrating to have to answer questions from the CEO about why we don't solve all our problems with magic beans from IBM's Watson. I understand that this is what they want. They want to drive executives' interest in the product, but I believe they do so at the expense of their goodwill with the tech community. Am I the only one who cringes when these ads air? Ed…

> "magic beans" is harsh IBM sells an image, not a working product, and they deserve some ridicule for it. I have worked with Watson and a decently large IBM consulting team, and 'magic beans' is a diplomatic way of putting it. 'Obfuscatory horse shit' is more accurate.

[deleted]

Re: Jefferies gives IBM Watson a Wall Street reality check

#176

Post by pgodzin »

agumonkey wrote: post #171
pgodzin wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/607965/a-reality-check-fo... was a good recent review. The only IBM source I know of are the press releases announcing new collaborations: https://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/presskit/27297.wss

Thanks, that's a nice and long list. I still wish I could get a more technical view of what you're doing in medicine, are there conferences or symposium ?

I also found https://www.ibm.com/blogs/watson-health/category/case-study/ and https://www.ibm.com/blogs/watson-health/category/white-paper... that show case studies and white papers.

There are also some publications linked at https://www.research.ibm.com/healthcare-and-life-sciences/ and http://researcher.watson.ibm.com/researcher/view_group_subpa...

http://researcher.ibm.com/researcher/view_group_pubs.php?grp...

I'm on the SWE side, while the research side does the conferences. I know that there were health conferences that IBM researchers have presented at but I'm not aware of which ones they were. Hope this helps!

Re: Jefferies gives IBM Watson a Wall Street reality check

#177

Post by dangero »

Anything that IBM puts out remember they are a consulting company, so they want to generate a huge brand name. That allows them to charge the consulting prices they need to charge to make this business work for them. IBM Watson is a collection of sort-of-working AI related APIs, but it gets A LOT of press. If they can create an AI brain, then people will believe they can do anything for them in the tech arena and that's the goal.

Re: Jefferies gives IBM Watson a Wall Street reality check

#178

Post by sunyataishere »

abtinf wrote: post #30
dpkonofa wrote: post #10

This and the comments below are really depressing to me. Watson seemed like such an exciting piece of tech and something that had the potential to change the world and now I feel like the shareholder's virus has stagnated it to the point of it being worthless. I've heard multiple stories where the staff that's assigned to demo and talk about Watson have no idea what they're talking about and that the marketing, manag…

Disclosure: I work in developer advocacy at IBM. If you are looking to build a project using cognitive technologies, you certainly should investigate your options. Each offering has different strengths with different workloads and small improvements in quality can go a long way. If you want to checkout the services for yourself without all the hype, take a look at the APIs on https://www.ibm.com/watson/developercloud…

Whoa - did you just provide a link to Watson APIs that include an service with the name of 'Phd API' and state that this info was without the hype?

You truly are an advocate for developers!!!

Oh IBM... I must thank you for the years of WebShere Commerce misery forced to downgrade JDKs to 1.4x while everyone else was developing on 7. Sigh

Re: Jefferies gives IBM Watson a Wall Street reality check

#179

Post by chipperyman573 »

lewisl9029 wrote: post #169
zoeysaurusrex wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm happy to be harsh because I've had years and years of experience dealing with IBM. Their tools are trash for the cost they want. The majority of their offerings are overengineered and prone to failure in a production setting. They are pros at selling to non-technical management, all the while IT employees get stuck dealing with the aftermath. We ended up getting stuck with the IBM version of work item management,…

I remember hearing a lot of great things about Cloudant, which happens to be from IBM, on HN and elsewhere. Is that just a notable exception or are there better alternatives out there these days for hosted CouchDB?

Didn't IBM buy Cloudant? And wasn't it based off of an Apache application?

Not saying it's not good (I've never used it), but IBM can't really get any credit for this. They just happen to have bought a decent product and now they sell it.

Re: Jefferies gives IBM Watson a Wall Street reality check

#180

Post by pdkl95 »

hrktb wrote: post #141
deepGem wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What perplexes me is that none of these seem to affect their services business. 39 billion in services revenues is nothing to scoff at. I mean how can a company build shitty products like this and be a world leader in services ? Do these units operate like two separate entities.

Traditionnaly at that scale, the people buying the product and the ones ending up using it are completely insulated by layers of bureaucracy. As long as the product can somewhat work, there won't be much repercussions for making shitty choices: the feedback won't go up enough or be ignored (as it is inconvenient)

> insulated by layers of bureaucracy

Misinterpretation is a recursive problem. The best description - by far - of this process is "How a plan becomes policy" (aka, "How Shit Happens").

https://funnyshit.com.au/the_plan.html

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