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

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

#261

Post by newen » Wed, Jun 27, 2018, 12:48 PM UTC

zmmmmm wrote: post #196

I think their strategy of collectively branding every single thing as Watson is actually pretty risky. Branding is powerful but it cuts both ways ... it will only take one high profile failure for that to ruin the brand across every product that has slavishly adopted it. Even here you see it happening - layoffs in one part that got labeled as "Watson" are immediately seen as indicative of a much bigger problem with W…

Yeah their branding of Watson is pretty bad since no one knows what Watson is anymore. It used to be the thing that played Jeopardy. Ok fine, we can generalize that to Watson being an NLP driven infromation retrieval system. But then I got pitched recently as Watson being an Nvidia DIGITS style system on the cloud. It was only then that I realized Watson is just a brand name for anything AI remotely AI related from IBM.

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

#262

Post by mindcrime » Wed, Jun 27, 2018, 1:48 PM UTC

cirgue wrote: post #88

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…

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.

techniques we’ve known about for decades

FWIW, "AI" as a field has been around since the 1950's. So calling something "AI" in no way implies that the techniques are especially new.

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

#263

Post by mindcrime » Wed, Jun 27, 2018, 1:54 PM UTC

cirgue wrote: post #103

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…

This is my point: the term AI has always been BS. It was BS when beam search was AI, it was BS when expert systems were AI, and it is equally as BS when applied to neural networks. It comes to the same thing: the 'AI' tools we use are increasingly good function approximators. That's it. It's still reaching the moon by building successively taller ladders.

This is my point: the term AI has always been BS

I don't see how this follows from this:

the 'AI' tools we use are increasingly good function approximators

Nothing in the definition of AI says that AI has to work the same way the human brain does... and as far as that goes, we're probably not 100% sure that, in the end, the brain is anything more than a really good function approximator and some applied statistics.

I would say the canonical definition of AI, to the extent that there is one, is roughly something like "making computers do things that previously only humans could do". If people think "AI is bullshit" I'd say it's because they're applying their own definition to the term, where there definition imposes much more stringent requirements.

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

#264

Post by ryanmcbride » Thu, Jun 28, 2018, 5:32 PM UTC

throwaway0255 wrote: post #205

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 laughed too hard at this. Reminds me of that famous Jim Reekes story: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C5d151lqJsA#t=2m4s Do you happen to remember what the copy was on that page? I'm sure it had to be something better than "Hey we made your cookie too big. Can we delete it? Ok thanks sorry about that." I bet they went with something subtle and vague, make the problem a little unclear and complicated-sounding, maybe…

I wish I had taken a picture. I don't remember exactly but it was something along the lines of:

"We are unable to process your request due to a problem with your cookie, please click below to delete the cookie"

And then there was just a normal button input.

Their logic around having the user click the button instead of just automatically deleting the cookie and moving on (Something that still shouldn't be necessary if you are using cookies correctly) is that they thought users would be upset at IBM automatically deleting their 'data' without asking. That data just being a bunch of unreadable values for IBMs services.