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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

#51

Post by andyidsinga »

andyidsinga wrote: post #41
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 crea…

BTW - in listening to that podcast I found a lot of parallels with database design.

whenever I'm asked to design a database for an early-stage system (I work in early stage tech ventures), I ask the following:

- what are the questions that this database should answer for you? How are those questions supporting your business goals 3,6,12 months out? (I'm trying to get to the business requirements here)

- who will be asking those questions (I'm trying to put together some user personas in my head)

- how frequently will they be asking these questions? corollary: how often will historical data be needed? (I'm thinking hot vs cold and complexity of retrieval, minimally required performance)

- how much data to we anticipate is needed to answer the questions (this is really tricky in new ventures - often the answer is more data than what will actually occur in practice in the first year)?

- finally, what systems & tools are people using to ask the questions and be notified of events? (I'm thinking about interfacing, apis)

its all an attempt to stay very focused on the questions and business drivers and the people who use the answers.

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

#53

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

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

#54

Post by kprybol »

pinewurst wrote: post #47
numbsafari wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Being rules based isn't necessarily a bad thing or disingenuous. I develop healthcare AI products (ML/DL researcher) and we actually aim to be able to translate our models into a rules based engine (find a strong signal, interpret/understand model well enough to translate/embed into a rules engine, look for a new signal in our models, rinse + repeat). We end up deploying a mix of rules based and true ML based models into production but it may not be immediately obvious to the end user which type of model they are using.

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

#55

Post by pinewurst »

kprybol wrote: post #54
pinewurst wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Being rules based isn't necessarily a bad thing or disingenuous. I develop healthcare AI products (ML/DL researcher) and we actually aim to be able to translate our models into a rules based engine (find a strong signal, interpret/understand model well enough to translate/embed into a rules engine, look for a new signal in our models, rinse + repeat). We end up deploying a mix of rules based and true ML based models…

I didn't mean it as being disingenuous - that's precisely the value that was sold and if you could do the proper "knowledge engineering", it worked well. It's just interesting to me having seen the previous turn of the AI hype wheel, how much is being repeated.

Another interesting thing was the transition from special purpose hardware - Lisp machines - to C code on commodity platforms. A contrast from today's ML moving in the other direction.

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

#56

Post by ThomPete »

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…

Agree. Consultancies rarely sell products or solutions. Instead they sell project management by making it sound like you are a more safe bet than a smaller product studio who actually do make products work. Its a real shame but i mostly blame the zero mistake KPI culture primarily fueled by how managers on the client side are promoted.

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

#57

Post by mathattack »

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…

Over the past 10 years I’ve been surprised when anyone smart would join IBM. I understand why people hung on, but why join that dying ship? Now I can’t think of any still there.

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

#58

Post by wnevets »

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…

>"Offering managers didn’t have technical backgrounds and sometimes came up with ideas for new products that were simply impossible."

how many of those managers will now be able to get even a higher paying job because they have manager of Watson AI project on their resume?

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

#59

Post by mlthoughts2018 »

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…

In fact, I would say apart from maybe self-driving cars, almost all of the biggest gains from machine learning are in unsexy, hidden backend problems, like automatically rectifying disparate data, optimizing resource utilization, flagging difficult-to-articulate events or triggers in a stream of data too large for human evaluation, machine translation, and other “unsexy” things.

Product interfaces usually offer simple features to users and the value proposition is easy to see. Effective use of machine learning is well hidden upstream in a bunch of unsexy preprocessing or heavy lifting to get to the interface. Not something you’d ever need to emphasize in marketing, except maybe at tech meetups or in recruiting materials, but not to the end consumer.

It just makes pop references to AI-powered products more egregious.

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

#60

Post by davidf18 »

NicoJuicy wrote: post #50
cirgue wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

Could you please elaborate? Does that include DeepMind?
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