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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

#211

Post by scardine »

cirgue wrote: post #48
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…

Watson's law: as the complexity of technology and business processes increases, the amount of time it takes for people to recognize and acknowledge that the emperor in not in fact wearing clothes increases in proportion to the profitability of the lie being sold.

"The Emperor's New Clothes" are made of the finest blockchain silk adorned with golden AI brocades.

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

#212

Post by gaius »

ryandrake wrote: post #151
paganel wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> yes, their json interface was the DOM, serialized as json. This is pure thedailywtf material.

Did the change request come complete with specific requirements on what the interface should include? Because it sounds like they produced exactly what was asked for: a JSON interface. If the requirements were poorly specified, you can’t lay all the blame on them.

Did the change request come complete with specific requirements

I get that you do need specs but c'mon, if you ask a plumber to fit a pipe from A to B and he uses one made out of cardboard would you think it was reasonable for him to say "well you didn't specify it had to carry water, pay me 3x as much to put it right". And then you find out that this is the first time he's even seen a pipe, but his business card says "senior plumbing expert".

You expect a basic level of competence and familiarity with the problem domain and good faith from any professional whose services you hire.

Also consider that a program is a spec, and if you are going to explicitly specify every little detail then you might as well just write the program yourself, there is literally no sane reason to put an outsourcer in the middle.

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

#213

Post by ItsMe000001 »

abiox wrote: post #199
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.

> None of the things you mentioned are even close to AI. then what is 'close to AI'?

Something that actually learns on its own and is not completely stumped when it encounters something new but actually learns. When it recognizes failure it should go and start learning by itself, i.e. try to get more data and analyze that and do its own trial and error - so that it actually grows in capabilities (on its own).

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

#214

Post by wallace_f »

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 wonder how long it will take for people to realize politics and bureaucracy does not reward merit

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

#215

Post by a_bonobo »

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…

IBM is one of the go-to partners for outsourcing tasks of the Australian government, and it's usually a dumpster fire.

- 2016. Australia decided to run a census, population wide (~22 million people), all online. If you didn't enter your stuff you risked a fine. You had one day to get a good 'snapshot'. The service, built by IBM, went down immediately.

'Census outage could have been prevented by turning router on and off again: IBM' http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-10-25/turning-router-off-and...

'IBM to pay more than $30m in compensation for census fail, Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull suggests' http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-11-25/ibm-to-pay-over-$30m-i... (Have they done this? I don't think so)

They said it was an 'overseas DDOS' but there is no proof for that, personally I think it was Australians accessing the page from overseas.

Interestingly, this is not on IBM's Wikipedia page.

- In Queensland, IBM borked the rollout of a new health payroll system so extremely that the state premier banned the state from outsourcing to IBM (and that was before the census catastrophe!!)

>The commission, headed by former supreme court judge Richard Chesterman, tied a number of IBM employees working on the contract bid to serious ethical transgressions, including using leaked information about competitors to gain advantage and attempting to access tender responses by opposing bidders Logica and Accenture.

https://www.itnews.com.au/news/queenslands-ibm-ban-lives-on-...

In the end, the state had to carry the costs (1.2 billion) https://www.itnews.com.au/news/qld-health-ibm-payroll-court-...

It was supposed to cost less than 10 million.

This is also not on IBM's Wikipedia page.

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

#216

Post by piva00 »

a_bonobo wrote: post #215
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…

IBM is one of the go-to partners for outsourcing tasks of the Australian government, and it's usually a dumpster fire. - 2016. Australia decided to run a census, population wide (~22 million people), all online. If you didn't enter your stuff you risked a fine. You had one day to get a good 'snapshot'. The service, built by IBM, went down immediately. 'Census outage could have been prevented by turning router on and…

What? $ 1.2 billion for a failed project that in 2010 Queensland's government gave IBM a waiver?

This is blatantly corrupt, why the fuck would a government give a company a waiver from their contractual responsibilities on a failed project? That's utterly insane.

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

#217

Post by Macuyiko »

gaius wrote: post #212
ryandrake wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did the change request come complete with specific requirements on what the interface should include? Because it sounds like they produced exactly what was asked for: a JSON interface. If the requirements were poorly specified, you can’t lay all the blame on them.

Did the change request come complete with specific requirements I get that you do need specs but c'mon, if you ask a plumber to fit a pipe from A to B and he uses one made out of cardboard would you think it was reasonable for him to say "well you didn't specify it had to carry water, pay me 3x as much to put it right". And then you find out that this is the first time he's even seen a pipe, but his business card say…

Exactly, this is everything that I hate about requirements management and requirements-driven-development in a nutshell. Way too often it just means: "we're actually too lazy / overworked / uninterested / have targets that don't align with the long-term best outcome, so we'll just force you to write down requirements which we know can't and won't ever be complete." It's the best way to cause internal politics to fire up and projects to belly up.

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

#218

Post by not_kurt_godel »

sushid wrote: post #209
curun1r wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At the large company I worked at, it was solved by frequent code audits to any team given subdomain of the company's company.com domain. We were explicitly told to ensure that anything not related to interoperability between company properties was to be set on the ourdomain.company.com subdomain. The team in charge of it had heuristics they used to monitor for unapproved infringements on that policy. If I decided I w…

To be fair, it seems like your organization's solution was to make it very difficult to do so, which is kind of a non-solution (aside from trnctng chars, which is a practice even a small ad tech startup that I was at did). Admittedly it is a better practice than continuing to stuff you cookie and direct users to a strange page once in a while.

How is that a non-solution? It should be very hard to introduce cookie bloat. Preferences can and should generally be stored server-side. I can't stand it when I lose settings on an account simply because my cookies are on another machine.

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

#219

Post by piva00 »

ryandrake wrote: post #151
paganel wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> yes, their json interface was the DOM, serialized as json. This is pure thedailywtf material.

Did the change request come complete with specific requirements on what the interface should include? Because it sounds like they produced exactly what was asked for: a JSON interface. If the requirements were poorly specified, you can’t lay all the blame on them.

You are talking to humans, not programming a machine, you don't have to instruct them on each minimal detailed step to specify something, you expect agency, even more if you are paying big bucks.

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

#220

Post by martinwww »

a_bonobo wrote: post #215
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…

IBM is one of the go-to partners for outsourcing tasks of the Australian government, and it's usually a dumpster fire. - 2016. Australia decided to run a census, population wide (~22 million people), all online. If you didn't enter your stuff you risked a fine. You had one day to get a good 'snapshot'. The service, built by IBM, went down immediately. 'Census outage could have been prevented by turning router on and…

It's everywhere the same story. In Czech Republic IBM has implemented quite a lot IT projects for government. Just for example : There's software for tax management of whole country which is running on mainframes from 1992, it was written in Informix 4GL language there's only GUI is MS-DOS based terminal. all officials need to work with that system.

Of course it was fine 15 years ago but from that time we had quite a lot changes in tax system, many new conditions has been addad and in the result we have unstable deprecated software where maintainability is nowadays near to ZERO.

There are currently no people who knows how it works and who knows Informix 4GL language in 2018... After few years it will be probably replaced but cost of new project will astronomical (...of course).

I am not blaming purely IBM, quite often government officials are incompetent when it comes to software project planning.

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