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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

#61

Post by kprybol »

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…

I've always viewed DeepMind as more of a skunk works program and less as a profit driven enterprise. DeepMind exists primarily to push the limits of what can be done when you put group of leading researchers together in a room, provide them with nearly limitless resources, and simply tell them to "go". I expect some of that effort to eventually trickle down into Google's consumer products (maybe a healthcare focused version of AutoML https://cloud.google.com/automl/). Google has already done a lot of work on the HIPPA side of things (https://cloud.google.com/security/compliance/hipaa/)

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

#62

Post by lifeisstillgood »

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 has been ever thus with IBM adverts - this was me moaning online from early 2000's

http://www.mikadosoftware.com/articles/ibmadverts

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

#64

Post by LrnByTeach »

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…

following is a text snippet from the Article . I do not know which part of the following is AI , it is pure "data analysis" writing few SQL queries . This is the Biggest problem of IBM, they bill these kind of things as AI .

> 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.

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

#66

Post by kprybol »

pinewurst wrote: post #55
kprybol wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 movi…

That's fair. Google's recent paper on predicting patient deaths is another good example of this (logistic regression + good feature engineering performed just as well as their deep learning models, and the logistic regression has the added benefit of being significantly more interpretable and as a result, actionable).

It'll be interesting to see when specialized ML focused silicon will become readily available. Right now I find ML libraries that are able to run on blended architectures (any combination of CPU and GPU's) much more exciting/impactful than TPU's. The ability to deploy on just about any cluster a customer may have available is huge.

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

#67

Post by randomsearch »

jacobsenscott wrote: post #63

Winter is coming. And none too soon. So tired of AI headlines.

It would be really great if we could somehow hold those overselling AI to account.

This may be possible this time round, because we’ll have a very good record of who said what and when via the web.

Without any kind of accountability, history will continue to repeat itself.

How about hyperbole.com, where you can google academic researchers and industrial leaders and pull up quotes from them, dated and fact-checked.

I’m sure you must be able to train a deep net to do this. They can do anything.

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

#68

Post by mindcrime »

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.…

I stayed for a few simple reasons...the fat consultant check I cashed every Friday. Exposure to some outstanding engineers and coders where I got to learn from true talent. The great strip club on A1A next to my rental in Lauderdale-by-the-Sea.

Heh... I did some work for IBM at the office of Cypress Creek Road back in that same time range. My fondest memory of the entire experience is eating at the Calypso Restaurant[1], a great Jamaican / Caribbean Islands place nearby.

I'd almost go back to Fort Lauderdale and work for IBM again (if they even still have a presence there) just for the Jamaican Jerk chicken from Calypso.

[1]: http://www.calypsorestaurant.com/

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

#69

Post by duxup »

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…

Other reports seemed to indicate that Watson (and maybe all AI) requires a lot of very careful, slow, and somewhat arduous data entry and testing to get good results.

I can imagine someone who doesn't know at IBM selling a product:

"Hey we will solve all these problems like magic!"

Then IBM comes back:

"Hey do you have all this data in a specific format and a ton of time to enter and test it and maybe we'll get back to you???"

That's a big loss of trust there with the customer if you come back with that.

It seems like these are products where a lot of caveats needs to be made clear to customers and a real careful technical partnership formed with them to succeed long term. You have to bring the customer along for the ride and exploration and keep them excited for a long time it sounds to make it work.

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

#70

Post by mv4 »

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…

Billions. IBM has spent billions.
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