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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

#221

Post by emmelaich »

lifeisstillgood wrote: post #62
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

That's great! Thanks.

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

#222

Post by easytiger »

piva00 wrote: post #216
a_bonobo wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If the project fails then the people who commissioned the project would be at fault, therefore these things rarely truly are considered failures

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

#223

Post by HelloNurse »

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.

The interface should include engineering.

A responsible developer is expected to ask insistently until the requirements make sense; whoever delivered the JSON DOM is stealing their pay, even if they did it knowingly as a joke or provocation.

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

#224

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

ItsMe000001 wrote: post #213
abiox wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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).

This excludes most human intelligence.

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

#225

Post by HelloNurse »

not_kurt_godel wrote: post #218
sushid wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Adding cookie data should be a big deal because if everything in the cookie is important valid reasons for needing more data (or less data) imply major architectural changes.

For example, after a merger in which two company websites should be integrated you might start with one simple cookie, transition quickly to two independent cookies on two domains, then use a cookie with two keys when the two sites have separate backends but the same domain, then eventually a cookie with a single key again after extensive replacements and reimplementations.

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

#226

Post by zeusk »

jonathankoren wrote: post #185
ggg9990 wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not a programmer. What’s so bad about it?

It doesn’t make any sense. The way a string is terminated in C is by a null character. ‘\0’ is a mnemonic. strlen() returns the length of a strong. It does this by doing a linear scan down the array until it finds the null, and the returns that index as the length. That line of code does nothing useful. It means, “scan through the array until you find a null, then write a null there.” Which is exactly what you had to…

using strlen(src) is also an amateur mistake, because the whole point of doing that (stncpy family, ensuring dst ends with null) is that dst might not be large enough to fit string from src.

It has to be the size of dst, which can only be known at the site of allocation in C (except for a non-clean way of looking at heap metadata).

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

#227

Post by OliverJones »

IBM. Twenty years ago my late father-in-law had his ancient DisplayWriter (1st-gen word processor) break down.

He called his local sales office. Somebody said, we've got a couple in a storeroom someplace. I'll bring one over. No charge.

That was customer service. That's how they built their reputation. Now they seem to be squandering it.

Sounds like they're headed now in a direction where they sell their artificial intelligence as being smarter than their customers. Sounds like they insist on disrupting their customers rather than their competitors. That Doesn't Work.(TM).

Every time somebody does that to a hospital it gets harder for other vendors to sell actually-useful stuff to health care operations. Not good.

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

#228

Post by nazri1 »

ggg9990 wrote: post #184
zeusk wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> dst[strlen(dst)] = '\0'; That line alone is cancerous.

Not a programmer. What’s so bad about it?

See also: Shlemiel the painter [1]

[1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/12/11/back-to-basics/

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

#229

Post by carlmr »

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 think self-driving cars are possible, and will probably become a reality. However I don't think it will be a generalized AI driving it. I'm thinking more along the lines of a lot of subsystems, one of which is visual object detection with deep learning (the one thing deep learning has shown it beats everything else), all the other subsystems from the sensors up to the driving behavior will have to be Properly Engineered(TM).

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

#230

Post by sbarre »

skolman wrote: post #142
cabaalis wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It will be a generational shift. You won't get current doctors (over 40) to change their ways, ever.

My previous doctor (who was probably mid-50s) didn't use email or any kind of secure electronic messaging system. Everything had to be faxed to him.

My new doctor who is younger uses all kinds of digital tools including a voice recorder with a pre-trained text-to-speech engine that understands medical terminology and codifies the transcription based on keywords.

So it's not entirely getting away from freetext but at least it's extracting some structured data from it automatically.

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