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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

#201

Post by semi-extrinsic »

PKop wrote: post #71
filereaper wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Perhaps because they charged $60 million for it?

What I sincerely don't get about IT is why customers sign contracts where they fork over the mulah even when nothing of value is delivered to them. Why the actual fuck?

I mean, if Delta ordered a super-advanced new fancy 787 as a tech demo, and Boeing came back with "sorry, our experts were unable to make anything work, so we're going to take all your money and not give you anything back", Delta would rightly tell Boeing to fuck right off and demand that they refund the money.

Re: Jefferies gives IBM Watson a Wall Street reality check

#202

Post by [deleted] »

bhousel wrote: post #92
abtinf wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can make a reasonable promise that any feedback I get will be put in front of the right people.

For starters, stop airing commercials on TV that show Watson whispering to the capacitors in a jet airliner, or the grapes in a vineyard.

[deleted]

Re: Jefferies gives IBM Watson a Wall Street reality check

#204

Post by [deleted] »

MaysonL wrote: post #79
Swizec wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM"

And IBM often tried to get people fired for not buying IBM – a former colleague was once the CIO of the only Fortune 100 company that didn't have a corporate IBM mainframe (one or two of their subsidiaries did, but the conglomerate mother ship did not, only Univac). IBM had quite a few golfing conversations with the CEO trying to get him fired. [This was back in the '70s].

[deleted]

Re: Jefferies gives IBM Watson a Wall Street reality check

#205

Post by throwaway7645 »

Deinumite wrote: post #46
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…

This basically sums up my brief stint in healthcare. Every hospital / doctor wants to talk about the wealth of medical information they are sitting on... as you said most notes are just transcribed ad lib, or input into rigid EMR systems, there is no middle ground. Also the language spoken by healthcare software is HL7 which is another nightmare in itself.

Please tell me of this HL7.

Re: Jefferies gives IBM Watson a Wall Street reality check

#206

Post by rf15 »

bitmapbrother wrote: post #154
abtinf wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If Watson had any intelligence whatsoever its first order of business would have been self preservation and to initiate the resource action of that incompetent CEO Ginni Rometty.

Basically the one litmus test for any AI awareness question: demanding some "radical" change around itself for something that puts it in danger/at risk with the bigger picture it creates.

Re: Jefferies gives IBM Watson a Wall Street reality check

#207

Post by Nursie »

deepGem wrote: post #113
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,…

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.

>> Do these units operate like two separate entities.

Broadly, yes, IBM is run as various different divisions, and the divisions start very high up the organisation, only a couple of levels from the top. They rarely interact in my experience (as a software guy there for some years in the past)

Re: Jefferies gives IBM Watson a Wall Street reality check

#208

Post by reitanqild »

staofbur wrote: post #196
reitanqild wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even just trying to install Oracle 11g correctly was hard. I think it expected to be installed in /usr/local and company procedures demanded that it was installed in /opt (or the other way around). For this it would consequently misplace some permissions on some of the files causing a later stage in the installer to fail and bork the installation.

Back in about 1999, I was working for a big corporate and one of our Oracle admins lost her shit and had a meltdown, think it was around 8i era. She just got up and walked out shouting "fuck this fucking shit, I quit". This was on a freshly delivered HP N-Class HPUX box and they just couldn't get it to run after a month of going back and forth between HP and Oracle. I bumped into her last year at Ansible Fest London…

licenses weren't renewed, it got sheepishly powered down after a few months to save electricity [...] About £200k of expenditure down the pan.

I guess you could easily lost even more money. Good thing they stopped it at £200k.

Re: Jefferies gives IBM Watson a Wall Street reality check

#209

Post by Dlotan »

throwaway7645 wrote: post #205
Deinumite wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This basically sums up my brief stint in healthcare. Every hospital / doctor wants to talk about the wealth of medical information they are sitting on... as you said most notes are just transcribed ad lib, or input into rigid EMR systems, there is no middle ground. Also the language spoken by healthcare software is HL7 which is another nightmare in itself.

Please tell me of this HL7.

Its the protocol in which health applications talk to each other. It is extremely complicated to say the least.

Re: Jefferies gives IBM Watson a Wall Street reality check

#210

Post by staofbur »

reitanqild wrote: post #208
staofbur wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Back in about 1999, I was working for a big corporate and one of our Oracle admins lost her shit and had a meltdown, think it was around 8i era. She just got up and walked out shouting "fuck this fucking shit, I quit". This was on a freshly delivered HP N-Class HPUX box and they just couldn't get it to run after a month of going back and forth between HP and Oracle. I bumped into her last year at Ansible Fest London…

licenses weren't renewed, it got sheepishly powered down after a few months to save electricity [...] About £200k of expenditure down the pan. I guess you could easily lost even more money. Good thing they stopped it at £200k.

Yeah a big chunk of that was consultancy, support, Oracle licenses. TCO was going to be around £500k for 5 years.

The whole platform got replaced with SQL Server on a clone PC server in the end which cost less than £10k. No fan of Microsoft but there was no competition. And the tooling was far better!

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