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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

#111

Post by detaro »

DoofusOfDeath wrote: post #110
rossdavidh wrote: post #91

Look I think everybody needs to cut IBM some slack here. Integrating technology with customer needs is hard, and it takes a while to get good at it, to get a process for reconciling with product managers want with what developers can actually make. Once IBM has been in this technology game for a little while, I'm sure they'll get the hang of it.

People aren't faulting IBM for tackling hard systems-integration problems. People are faulting IBM for over-promising, under-delivering, using misleading advertising, and internally seeming to have foolish management practices.

given this line

> Once IBM has been in this technology game for a little while, I'm sure they'll get the hang of it.

I'd assume the parent is being sarcastic

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

#112

Post by DoofusOfDeath »

victor106 wrote: post #75

The problems with Watson does not mean that this is a problem with AI. If history is any guide IBM fails but eventually succeeds during most technological revolutions (PC, ecommerce etc)

Can you restate that more precisely?

In particular, I'm not sure what sets comprise the numerator and denominator of "most technological revolutions".

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

#113

Post by kprybol »

fjsolwmv wrote: post #87
kprybol wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

From my experiences (currently work with several Fortune 100 health insurers/benefits managers, and have previously worked for another large insurer, a major academic medical center, and a large pharma company), healthcare organizations tend to be rather cloud adverse (most of our contracts very explicitly forbid us from using any form of 3rd party cloud computing). So while I agree that much of the heavy lifting will shift to the cloud (or already has), I expect health analytics will continue to favor on-premises solutions (GPU’s still tend to be pretty rare compared to CPU based clusters but are slowly becoming more common).

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

#114

Post by occamrazor »

mathattack wrote: post #57
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…

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.

Who says IBM is dying? They aren’t anymore (since a long time) at the bleeding edge of research, but they still have a solid consulting and integration business. They also offer decent salaries and good opportunities for sales-oriented technical people. It wouldn’t be my first choice of employer, however I can see how some people would enjoy working there.

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

#116

Post by vanadium »

mindcrime wrote: post #81
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,…

"IBM Watson Marketing Automation" being another I was made painfully aware of recently, which was the result of the Silverpop acquisition at least in part.

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

#117

Post by vanadium »

patwolf wrote: post #29
dmix wrote: post #26

Anyone know what "RA" stand for? The employees kept mentioning it on the "Watching IBM" blog. I couldn't find a decent match via Google. For ex: > IBM Watson Health has initiated a significant RA across multiple offices.

Resource Action. That's just euphemistic IBM jargon for layoffs.

Is it possible to dehumanize the firing process any further than the words, "Resource Action"?

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

#118

Post by cabaalis »

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…

Being directly involved in the execution of the example you gave, I believe ML would be unnecessary and error-prone.

Even if successful, a system which could "interpret" a health record (such as a freetext note) using anything other than properly codified data would set the health industry back a decade. Moving doctors away from freetexting their notes is the only way to advance the industry.

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

#119

Post by philjohn »

delinka wrote: post #105
coderdude wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those two departments couldn't possibly be related. It seems unfair to base judgement on the entire company for that.

I dunno ... seems to me an indication of a larger systemic problem: "we couldn't even provide a company-wide engineering solution for this simple problem, so here's how we used a hack..."

That's the problem you get with silo'd teams.

If they had a core technology team they could handle things like this more gracefully. Or maybe not, this is IBM after all.

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

#120

Post by BigChiefSmokem »

hellofunk wrote: post #73

I'm going to play devil's advocate and call it: Self-driving cars have killed pedestrians, Watson isn't doing all they wanted... is this the dawn of a new winter?

I found out that Tesla's autopilot technology can't even really detect stationary objects. Albeit this is hard technically as it's actually a point of reference physics problem but the writing on the wall is clear: marketing departments are overpromising and no one is really delivering big on AI, not even Google as a lot of other companies have already matched their efforts (Microsoft, Waze, etc.). IBM? Give me a break.

Anyways, may I interest you in cheap VR headset?

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