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

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

#81

Post by mindcrime » Mon, Jun 25, 2018, 7:11 PM UTC

phamilton wrote: post #7

Is Watson a codebase? Or is it just a brand? It seems to me that Watson is basically just IBM's version of AWS/GCE services (at least the non infra ones). But it gets thrown around as a buzzword so often. The marketing makes it look like there's a single AI codebase that can be accessed through a bunch of APIs, but I would be very surprised if that was actually the case.

Is Watson a codebase? Or is it just a brand?

Both, sort of. There is a "thing" called Watson, which is related to the Watson that played Jeopardy. But "Watson" is also a brand which lumps in stuff that has absolutely nothing to do with the "old" Watson.

To illustrate a bit.. "Watson Health" is (or was) made up of a ton of people and technologies who came into IBM as the result of several acquisitions: Truven, Phytel, Explorys, etc. In many cases, they repackaged stuff from those vendors, gave it a "Watson name" and shipped it. And some of this stuff was literally no more sophisticated than linear regression / logistic regression, etc.

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

#82

Post by fjsolwmv » Mon, Jun 25, 2018, 7:19 PM UTC

bunderbunder wrote: post #19

stefan_ wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

Watson is a thing that is good at Jeopardy. Therefore it is not AI. AI is only things that a computer can not do. Nothing that exists is ever AI

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

#83

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Jun 25, 2018, 7:21 PM UTC

opportune wrote: post #72

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…

IBM was simply an AI hype train grifter. AI is still valuable (although it's not advancing as quickly now as it was in, say, 2015), it's just that you have to dig deep to make sure that the "AI" being used is actually AI and that it's being used in an appropriate way.

[deleted]

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

#84

Post by fjsolwmv » Mon, Jun 25, 2018, 7:22 PM UTC

LrnByTeach wrote: post #64

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 schedul…

The point is it's NOT SQL. It's NLP and whatnot to extract value from relatively natural non-fully schematized data.

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

#85

Post by txsh » Mon, Jun 25, 2018, 7:23 PM UTC

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…

> If you ask me, it is more likely for watsons law to be ...burn thru hundreds of millions and ultimately fail rather then the intended meaning.

That’s already called Musk’s Law.

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

#86

Post by fjsolwmv » Mon, Jun 25, 2018, 7:23 PM UTC

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.

This is the same thing done by a startup that is current spamming Reddit with ads.

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

#87

Post by fjsolwmv » Mon, Jun 25, 2018, 7:25 PM UTC

kprybol wrote: post #66

pinewurst wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

In the near future customers don't have clusters, cloud providers offer elastic adaptive compute sharing.

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

#88

Post by cirgue » Mon, Jun 25, 2018, 7:28 PM UTC

nostrademons wrote: post #80

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…

I use & depend upon plenty of products that are built upon AI - GMail spam filtering & categorized inbox, Google image search, YouTube & Netflix recommendations, cheque OCR at my ATM, predictive keyboards on my phone, Amazon's "people also buy with this product" feature, Google translate, computer opponents in games that I play, and all of the signals that feed into Google Search. The irony is that not one of these b…

None of the things you mentioned are even close to AI. They’re applied statistics, and they mostly use techniques we’ve known about for decades but have only now found a use case because computing and storage is cheap enough to make them viable.

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

#89

Post by EthanHeilman » Mon, Jun 25, 2018, 7:28 PM UTC

nostrademons wrote: post #80

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…

I use & depend upon plenty of products that are built upon AI - GMail spam filtering & categorized inbox, Google image search, YouTube & Netflix recommendations, cheque OCR at my ATM, predictive keyboards on my phone, Amazon's "people also buy with this product" feature, Google translate, computer opponents in games that I play, and all of the signals that feed into Google Search. The irony is that not one of these b…

>The irony is that not one of these bills itself as AI. It's just "a product that works"

I think you are on to something, put differently: If you need to use the term "AI" to enhance the marketability of the product it is probably because the product sucks.

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

#90

Post by bunderbunder » Mon, Jun 25, 2018, 7:35 PM UTC

fjsolwmv wrote: post #82

bunderbunder wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

Watson is a thing that is good at Jeopardy. Therefore it is not AI. AI is only things that a computer can not do. Nothing that exists is ever AI

Jeopardy is an information retrieval problem in a game show format, with the minor twist that the query is phrased as a declarative sentence and the response is phrased as an interrogative one.

AI is not simply things that a computer can't do yet. But I think most of people who aren't currently trying to sell a piece of software would expect AI to include some things that you don't need to do to play Jeopardy. I'd want to see general-purpose pattern recognition, for example.