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Layoffs at Watson Health Reveal IBM’s Problem with AI

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

#41

Post by andyidsinga »

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…

There's a pretty good podcast interview with Eugene Dubossarsky that has relevant discussion about issues with management and data science in general. https://www.datafuturology.com/podcast/1

Here are a few of my notes (my words not the interviewee's):

- in order to use data science, you have to have creative people thinking about data on the front end

- they don't have to be data scientists, but they need to be creative and want data to support decisions and iteration via feedback loops

- that creativity and desire will lead to "doing good data science"

- management on the receiving end of data science output must be intelligent in terms of synthesizing many inputs and have a strong desire to puzzle through the implications. If management is asking the data science to actually make the decisions - the situation is broken

- data science must be done with provisions for decision support and feedback loops; this is the output that is helping drive the business.

- Lack of desire for decision support and feedback loops leads to "fancy pets" and management using data science as a means to brag about what they are doing; but the data science might not being doing anything to drive the business meaningfully.

- data science that attempts to actually make decisions vs providing decision support is likely in the category of "commodity data science". Corollary : non-commodity data science is the kind that supports decisions in executing higher-level business strategy. Strategy at that level has rather unique attributes and is embedded in unique circumstances for a particular business. This requires a good data scientist to help tackle.

(hope this is useful)

(edit typos,grammar)

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

#42

Post by numbsafari »

pinewurst wrote: post #28
bluetwo wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Getting a nice check while doing nothing actually productive is soul crushing. Good for the short term but it's a Chinese water torture in the long run. Two years ago at their vegas conference they had a coffee shop that used AI to recommend coffee types. I thought "boy, they don't understand this technology".

Many years ago, when AI was expert systems and "neural networks" were fringe, the main demo for one of the public expert system leaders was the Wine Advisor. You'd tell it what you were going to eat and it would recommend a wine.

And behind the scenes it was probably the equivalent of flipping a coin between red and white.

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

#43

Post by appstateguy »

krona wrote: post #11
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 res…

> 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.

As an ex-IBMer this is so true and so frustrating at the same time. Engineers are thrashed about on a nearly sprintly basis by PM's with short attention spans and no understanding of how disruptive their continuously changing requirements are.

It doesn't help that IBM consistently puts the cart before the horse is even born and pivots multiple teams all at the same time such that nothing you build upon is stable or consistent. Working there was maddening.

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

#44

Post by puzzle »

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…

Deepmind has at least one example of saving Google millions: https://deepmind.com/blog/deepmind-ai-reduces-google-data-ce...

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

#45

Post by ska »

pm90 wrote: post #10
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 is my biggest gripe with this as well. We certainly don't want an another AI winter, especially not in health, where I'm hoping (perhaps too optimistically) that it will allow better and cheaper care.

   that it will allow better and cheaper care.
That will happen, but you have to think 20 year plans, not 5 year plans.

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

#46

Post by cirgue »

krona wrote: post #11
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 res…

> 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.

The cynic in me says that every use of the term AI in any capacity is to sell experience and not functionality. When was the last time you used a product billed as 'AI' and thought 'wow, this is a huge game changer'? Siri is cool, but it's ultimately not super useful. Google translate is incredible, but it can only do what it can do because of the absolutely mind-boggling amount of training data that google can access. Most disciplines have the problem of not enough data, despite what 'big-data' folks say. In contrast, humans can extrapolate and make reliable predictions about the future based on really small sample sizes. We can pick up a new skill or recognize a new pattern with a high degree of accuracy really effing fast compared to a computer. This gives humans an enormous advantage. If IBM and anyone else in this space were really focused on delivering excellent real-world results, step 0 is building out world-class data integration and search tools (which we still actually suck at, weirdly.)

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

#47

Post by pinewurst »

numbsafari wrote: post #42
pinewurst wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many years ago, when AI was expert systems and "neural networks" were fringe, the main demo for one of the public expert system leaders was the Wine Advisor. You'd tell it what you were going to eat and it would recommend a wine.

And behind the scenes it was probably the equivalent of flipping a coin between red and white.

It was totally rule-based. More complex systems had a little more probabilistic stuff via Bayes and "certainty factors", but not this one.

I worked on another one for this company called Vibration Advisor which diagnosed odd noises in GM cars.

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

#48

Post by cirgue »

brootstrap wrote: post #20

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 automate…

Watson's law: as the complexity of technology and business processes increases, the amount of time it takes for people to recognize and acknowledge that the emperor in not in fact wearing clothes increases in proportion to the profitability of the lie being sold.

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

#49

Post by draw_down »

bluetwo wrote: post #9
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.…

Getting a nice check while doing nothing actually productive is soul crushing. Good for the short term but it's a Chinese water torture in the long run. Two years ago at their vegas conference they had a coffee shop that used AI to recommend coffee types. I thought "boy, they don't understand this technology".

Nearly everything about working in modern corporations is terrible, so a good paycheck and not-too-stressful working conditions are close to the best that most of us can hope for.

Of course, there are those who make their way into the small clique of people at any tech company that get to do impactful, fulfilling work. But any given person is unlikely to be one of them, and if you want to be one of them you usually have to kill yourself working crazy hours first. (And probably afterwards too.)

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

#50

Post by NicoJuicy »

cirgue wrote: post #46
krona wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 res…

> 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. The cynic in me says that every use of the term AI in any capacity is to sell experience and not functionality. When was the last time you used a product billed as 'AI' and thought 'wow, this is a huge game changer'? Siri is cool, but it's ultimately…

Many people mention even a worser search experience with Google and AI
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