Do we have a rehash count on this? Getting old...
IBM Has a Watson Dilemma
31–40 of 49 posts
Re: IBM Has a Watson Dilemma
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
I thought one of Watson's main projected uses was healthcare. Isn't Google's stake in healthcare via DeepMind actually make them competitors in that sense? Unless I'm missing something here, I have not researched Watson a lot.
They're competitors in the sense that neither are worth anything to the average medical Doctor at this point. I don't mean this as a disparagement, merely as a dispassionate observation. Doctors need alerts about contra-indications of drugs they and their patients' other doctors have prescribed more than they need AI-derived diagnoses, for example.
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Re: IBM Has a Watson Dilemma
#33So given that IBM’s only big commercial bet is (was?) Watson and it is clearly not going to drive significant revenue.. what do IBM do next? They ballsed up cloud, they let the rather impressive DB2 wither, and their software suite is... meh.
Broadcom might be interested in acquiring them.
Broadcom ($90b market cap) is worth 70% of what IBM ($133b market cap) is worth..
Re: IBM Has a Watson Dilemma
#34Watson isn't what investors and the general public thinks it is. It's now more or less some classifier/machine learning as a service plus a dev integration team you can hire to pull it into your codebase (which by the way, is lots of $$$) It is not difficult for anyone on HN to spend a weekend, read a machine learning book, and replicate most of Watson's functionality. It's IBM marketing at it's finest.
You should do that then. After you’re done you can staff up 400 sales people at $120000 salaries to snatch one of IBM’s clients to a $60m contract and make a cool $10m+ profit.
Worked in a similiar setup as client of IBM and can confirm what you mentioned, where they tend sell consultancy on some ‘enterprise’ functionality that is already taken over by open source or better services like offered by Azure or AWS
Re: IBM Has a Watson Dilemma
#35My experience with Watson is a manager asking if I had any project ideas for it because the company had “Watson time” that no one could think of a way to use. I tried to picture the chain of events necessary for the exchange to have taken place that wasn’t comical. I failed. After being forced into ClearCase use at another company, I couldn’t help but imagine how much damage IBM sales has done to the software industr…
I’ve been in similar positions, but you can’t blame IBM — the situation that you found yourself in has everything to do with decision making at your employer.
You could tell the same story or worse about Oracle, HP, etc. The difference is that IBM’s strategy of tying hardware to solutions has kept it viable far longer than its competitors.
I’d argue that Microsoft is worse — at least IBM treats your boss’ boss to steak and golf. Microsoft burrows in with bundled ELAs. The annual cost to carry support + maintenance on some products is going to be as high as 39% of product price!
Re: IBM Has a Watson Dilemma
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
What a horrible review. The cancer research isn't at all what you make it out to be. It's legitimate and does have some real proven value despite the recent backlash in certain parts of the press. It's not perfect but the advancements that have been made are significant. It's easy to stand on the sidelines and throw rocks at other peoples efforts based on very little first hand information but please, this isn't twit…
Not on the sidelines, I’m on the field. That’s why I’m glad to see the reality finally getting attention. As the article says, a lot of healthcare professionals that once were onboard have distanced themselves from IBM and these projects.
So is there a better oncologist’s assistant AI out there? Or is the sweet spot somewhere between picking music you’ll like, suggesting when you should leave for an appointment to manage traffic and playing chess or go?
I understand the dislike of the marketing, but something like Watson in medicine is a moonshot attempt. Can CNNs and whatever other stuff Watson has available to it simply not handle cancer? Or is it broken? Or is the literature and training data bad or there just isn’t enough of it? I’m really fascinated by the stories of it giving detrimental treatment suggestions, I could see it happening a couple times and word getting out (like a new file system corrupting data) but if that’s really normal then something is broken, right? Maybe it’s misunderstanding the training literature, which should be a correctable software bug. I’m just guessing.
Re: IBM Has a Watson Dilemma
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not on the sidelines, I’m on the field. That’s why I’m glad to see the reality finally getting attention. As the article says, a lot of healthcare professionals that once were onboard have distanced themselves from IBM and these projects.
So is there a better oncologist’s assistant AI out there? Or is the sweet spot somewhere between picking music you’ll like, suggesting when you should leave for an appointment to manage traffic and playing chess or go? I understand the dislike of the marketing, but something like Watson in medicine is a moonshot attempt. Can CNNs and whatever other stuff Watson has available to it simply not handle cancer? Or is it b…
There’s nothing inherently wrong with the technology.
However, doing ML well isn’t really about the ML as much as it’s about getting everything leading up to the ML right. That’s the difference between value-add applications of ML and an expensive mess. IBM didn’t understand that and hence the mess they’re in now with Watson.
Re: IBM Has a Watson Dilemma
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It is not difficult for anyone on HN to spend a weekend, read a machine learning book, and replicate most of Watson's functionality Yea.... I'm sure that's exactly how it is.
Reminds me of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=678501
reminds me of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=537246
It's a "china" grade replica based on Django, from the commit message it's done alone by some not talented dude, cost far less than 6 months.
Re: IBM Has a Watson Dilemma
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
I worked at Epic years ago, but even then it was able to warn about drug interactions. But those warnings were configured on a site-to-site basis; your normal doctor's hospital (or practice) may not have configured drug interaction checks.
Not only that, but if the software at the Urgent Care is that old, it may be raising false flags on things that are no longer considered clinically relevant and just present a hassle for the provider to click through.
The age of the software would not reflect the quality of the data. I'm positive that these alerts are updated with new drugs and contradiction logic continuosly.
Re: IBM Has a Watson Dilemma
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
I thought one of Watson's main projected uses was healthcare. Isn't Google's stake in healthcare via DeepMind actually make them competitors in that sense? Unless I'm missing something here, I have not researched Watson a lot.
They're competitors in the sense that neither are worth anything to the average medical Doctor at this point. I don't mean this as a disparagement, merely as a dispassionate observation. Doctors need alerts about contra-indications of drugs they and their patients' other doctors have prescribed more than they need AI-derived diagnoses, for example.
I regret having only one upvote to give you.
The state of information flow in today's clinical settings is depressingly bad, especially when you see what computers can do today.
The focus on trendy techs we are experiencing in hospitals really reflects how backwards people have their priorities.