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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

#141

Post by cncrnd »

ryanmcbride wrote: post #94

I've never interacted directly with IBM, but I remember about 2 years ago, they had a talk at the Akamai Edge conference about how they dealt with bloated cookies. The company I work for has the same problem so I sat in to see what their solution was. The problem they were having is that all the various IBM lines of business added so much garbage onto the client's cookie, that eventually their pages would stop loadin…

I find it hilarious that they made this into a talk! There must be something more to it?

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

#142

Post by skolman »

cabaalis wrote: post #118
LrnByTeach wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is something I've always wondered about- how would you do it? How do you break the cycle of freetext EHR notes?

Doing so could have incredible utility for sharing data across various clinics/hospitals/pharmacies/etc.

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

#143

Post by iteriteratedone »

I see a lot of bad tech IBM antecdotes ... every place of any significance has bad tech. Your good solid application had a bad library , a poor structured table. Encapsulating this problem is a trait of good design.

How much code does IBM have? I have read the bad stories , anyone have good tales? And otherwise does anyone know their total code base size? Leys be engineers about this not journalist.

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

#144

Post by Nimitz14 »

nostrademons wrote: post #97
cirgue wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The recommendation, translation, & image classification algorithms are all done with deep-learning; that's considered AI now. There was a time, not all that long ago, when SVMs, Bayesian networks, and perceptrons were considered AI. That's behind the spam filters, predictive keyboards, and most of the search signals. There was a time, a bit longer ago, when beam search and A* were considered AI. That's behind the gam…

> There was a time, a bit longer ago, when beam search and A* were considered AI.

Yeah, maybe the marketing people said that..

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

#145

Post by downrightmike »

stephengillie wrote: post #13
warrenm wrote: post #5

Does it really qualify as "news" any more when there are layoffs at IBM?

Who makes money by pointing out flaws at IBM? Their stock on NASDAQ is 139.31 as of Jun 25 12:58 PM ET. Is there a large enough short position to be worth buying a news article?

Already priced in and layoffs have an opposite effect.

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

#146

Post by abhgh »

ModernMech wrote: post #133
abhgh wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an interesting comment - where would you draw the line between AI and applied statistics? A lot of AI which happens to be ML (not saying there is non-ML AI, just that a significant chunk of AI being practiced today is ML) also happens to be applied statistics. Or have statistical interpretations. Also, because something has been around for decades does not make it not AI. For ex the cheque OCR mentioned proba…

The line is clear: everything today branded "AI" is just applied statistics. AI is a buzzword. I don't know what the definition of intelligence is, but I have a feeling it doesn't rest anywhere near concepts like function approximation, and that's all even the most sophisticated "AIs" at Google or Facebook or Apple boil down to.

What was not clear from your earlier comment, and is now, is that when you say AI you don't mean AI as is practiced by most of academia and the industry but the vision of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). If so, yes, that's a good point to make. However, it is debatable whether the path of statistical learning wont lead to AGI, or is not how our brains function, or the truth partly does comprise of statistical learning and part of something else. The Norvig-Chomsky debate is an example of the arguments on both sides.

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

#147

Post by makapuf »

Nimitz14 wrote: post #144
nostrademons wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The recommendation, translation, & image classification algorithms are all done with deep-learning; that's considered AI now. There was a time, not all that long ago, when SVMs, Bayesian networks, and perceptrons were considered AI. That's behind the spam filters, predictive keyboards, and most of the search signals. There was a time, a bit longer ago, when beam search and A* were considered AI. That's behind the gam…

> There was a time, a bit longer ago, when beam search and A* were considered AI. Yeah, maybe the marketing people said that..

Well in game design you still call them AI. Of course this use of AI does not impress anyone per se, it's just a name and not a selling point.

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

#148

Post by akfanta »

defen wrote: post #123
ryanmcbride wrote: post #94

I've never interacted directly with IBM, but I remember about 2 years ago, they had a talk at the Akamai Edge conference about how they dealt with bloated cookies. The company I work for has the same problem so I sat in to see what their solution was. The problem they were having is that all the various IBM lines of business added so much garbage onto the client's cookie, that eventually their pages would stop loadin…

How did your company solve it?

nice try, IBM.

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

#149

Post by Retra »

EthanHeilman wrote: post #89
nostrademons wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Companies also do that when trolling for investors.

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

#150

Post by workinthehead »

smartician wrote: post #134
ryanmcbride wrote: post #94

I've never interacted directly with IBM, but I remember about 2 years ago, they had a talk at the Akamai Edge conference about how they dealt with bloated cookies. The company I work for has the same problem so I sat in to see what their solution was. The problem they were having is that all the various IBM lines of business added so much garbage onto the client's cookie, that eventually their pages would stop loadin…

We have run into the same issue before. Many third party services like Optimizely for example just stuff all their tracking information into a cookie, serialized as JSON, which you as the site owner don't really have much control over. The problem is not that they wouldn't be able to parse the cookie, it's that Akamai edge node web server (Nginx or Apache, don't remember) rejects any request with a header that's abov…

While you raise a valid issue, you don't know that IBM didn't also have trouble parsing large cookies. And even if they didn't, your information doesn't exactly excuse IBM for using over 8 kilobytes of data to send cookies back and forth.
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