Layoffs at Watson Health Reveal IBM’s Problem with AI • Hacker News Board

Re: Layoffs at Watson Health Reveal IBM’s Problem with AI

#11

Post by krona » Mon, Jun 25, 2018, 5:11 PM UTC

glup wrote: post #3

"Offering managers didn’t have technical backgrounds and sometimes came up with ideas for new products that were simply impossible." Sounds like they drank their own kool-aid, e.g., "Products That Enhance and Amplify Human Expertise," rather than understand the actual limitations and possibilities of ML. And it seems to me that they're still doing it with this nonsense about a human-level "AI" debating stack. The ove…

That's surely part of the problem, but the catalyst is the marketing strategy that is used to brainwash the employees. In essence; sell the experience, not the product.

This works well for IBM generally (the products are shit) but especially well for Watson because it's extremely easy to sell AI without getting bogged down in details. You want to identify brain tumors? We'll just teach Watson to do it.

Whilst IBM research might be able to pull it off, it'll never get to market because there is nobody capable of making good products at IBM anymore.

Re: Layoffs at Watson Health Reveal IBM’s Problem with AI

#12

Post by apo » Mon, Jun 25, 2018, 5:13 PM UTC

The health care landscape is strewn with the wreckage of software companies who thought the latest shiny software doodad could cause a "disruption" like it had in so many other industries.

People who know that healthcare is different try to warn them. They don't listen. Instead they charge in with people who have no experience in the field.

From the article:

After the acquisition, IBM management started the process known internally as “bluewashing,” in which an acquired company’s branding and operations are brought into alignment with IBM’s way of doing things. During this bluewashing, “everything stopped,” the first Phytel engineer says, and the workers were told not to focus on improving their existing product for current clients. “People were sitting around doing nothing for almost a year,” the second engineer says.

Re: Layoffs at Watson Health Reveal IBM’s Problem with AI

#13

Post by stephengillie » Mon, Jun 25, 2018, 5:14 PM UTC

warrenm wrote: post #5

Does it really qualify as "news" any more when there are layoffs at IBM?

Who makes money by pointing out flaws at IBM? Their stock on NASDAQ is 139.31 as of Jun 25 12:58 PM ET. Is there a large enough short position to be worth buying a news article?

Re: Layoffs at Watson Health Reveal IBM’s Problem with AI

#14

Post by stefan_ » Mon, Jun 25, 2018, 5:16 PM UTC

glup wrote: post #3

"Offering managers didn’t have technical backgrounds and sometimes came up with ideas for new products that were simply impossible." Sounds like they drank their own kool-aid, e.g., "Products That Enhance and Amplify Human Expertise," rather than understand the actual limitations and possibilities of ML. And it seems to me that they're still doing it with this nonsense about a human-level "AI" debating stack. The ove…

It's double whammy for the Watson stuff, because not only did IBM lose track with AI, they also had that whole cloud thing whoosh by them. So not only do you have marketing telling outrageous lies about the abilities of their AI systems, they're also exaggerating the cloud angle where Watson is a cornerstone.

Re: Layoffs at Watson Health Reveal IBM’s Problem with AI

#15

Post by cptskippy » Mon, Jun 25, 2018, 5:16 PM UTC

lacker wrote: post #8

This sounds like a case where the AI is used in a "marketing" way to make people interested in a product, and then there isn't really much AI involved, and the people developing the AI have a struggle to prove that it's relevant to the business. I wonder if DeepMind at Google has a similar problem. It is certainly getting a lot of headlines, but there are plenty of other AI groups within Google that do business-relev…

> This sounds like a case where the AI is used in a "marketing" way to make people interested in a product, and then there isn't really much AI involved, and the people developing the AI have a struggle to prove that it's relevant to the business.

It's pretty common in many industries to have products to showcase your chops while providing zero real world value and zero sales.

Re: Layoffs at Watson Health Reveal IBM’s Problem with AI

#16

Post by alienreborn » Mon, Jun 25, 2018, 5:17 PM UTC

glup wrote: post #3

"Offering managers didn’t have technical backgrounds and sometimes came up with ideas for new products that were simply impossible." Sounds like they drank their own kool-aid, e.g., "Products That Enhance and Amplify Human Expertise," rather than understand the actual limitations and possibilities of ML. And it seems to me that they're still doing it with this nonsense about a human-level "AI" debating stack. The ove…

Whats EMR? (definitely not Elastic Map Reduce)

Re: Layoffs at Watson Health Reveal IBM’s Problem with AI

#17

Post by a5huynh » Mon, Jun 25, 2018, 5:17 PM UTC

alienreborn wrote: post #16

glup wrote: post #3

"Offering managers didn’t have technical backgrounds and sometimes came up with ideas for new products that were simply impossible." Sounds like they drank their own kool-aid, e.g., "Products That Enhance and Amplify Human Expertise," rather than understand the actual limitations and possibilities of ML. And it seems to me that they're still doing it with this nonsense about a human-level "AI" debating stack. The ove…

Whats EMR? (definitely not Elastic Map Reduce)

Electronic Medical Record(s)

Re: Layoffs at Watson Health Reveal IBM’s Problem with AI

#18

Post by raverbashing » Mon, Jun 25, 2018, 5:18 PM UTC

cubano wrote: post #2

Isn't this just the same problem IBM has had for...well...most of my adult life? I had a contract gig at IBM Advanced Technology in Boca for about 18 months in early 2001-2002. Talk about missing the boat... I was brought in to prop up a soon-to-be-failed project for the Japanese government...basically a "Napster for Tokyo" that would allow paid-for-play C2C song sharing for customers of "the Big 5" record companies.…

> IBM is just too big to get out of its own way

Brilliantly put

Funny thing is, when it did get out of its own way, what did we get? The IBM PC

Re: Layoffs at Watson Health Reveal IBM’s Problem with AI

#19

Post by bunderbunder » Mon, Jun 25, 2018, 5:19 PM UTC

stefan_ wrote: post #14

glup wrote: post #3

"Offering managers didn’t have technical backgrounds and sometimes came up with ideas for new products that were simply impossible." Sounds like they drank their own kool-aid, e.g., "Products That Enhance and Amplify Human Expertise," rather than understand the actual limitations and possibilities of ML. And it seems to me that they're still doing it with this nonsense about a human-level "AI" debating stack. The ove…

It's double whammy for the Watson stuff, because not only did IBM lose track with AI, they also had that whole cloud thing whoosh by them. So not only do you have marketing telling outrageous lies about the abilities of their AI systems, they're also exaggerating the cloud angle where Watson is a cornerstone.

Possibly the most outrageous lie was calling it AI in the first place.

Watson is a $@#% amazing information retrieval system. Information retrieval is only a small part of what people think of when they think, "AI".

Re: Layoffs at Watson Health Reveal IBM’s Problem with AI

#20

Post by brootstrap » Mon, Jun 25, 2018, 5:20 PM UTC

This stuff is the friggen worst if you ask me. i'm so done with the AI hype train and IBM is the worst. Linked article mentions a 'watsons law' (similar to moore's law etc). If you ask me, it is more likely for watsons law to be that all commercial BigCo 'AI' offerings will burn thru hundreds of millions and ultimately fail rather then the intended meaning.

"Phytel’s contribution was analytics paired with an automated patient communication system. A clinic could use the system to search its patient records and find, for example, all the men over age 45 who were overdue for a colonoscopy, and then use an autocall to remind them to schedule the dreaded appointment"

This shit isnt AI it's literally a database query and then some 3rd party library to send a text message or a phone call.