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IBM Watson Overpromised and Underdelivered on AI Health Care

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Re: IBM Watson Overpromised and Underdelivered on AI Health Care

#11

Don't want to sound too mean but this is not the first time IBM overpromised and underdelivered. Anyone surprised by this?

To be fair, IBM has succeeded at big jobs too. For instance, they developed software for the Apollo mission and the Space Shuttle. The IBM/360. The IBM PC. AS/400.

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Re: IBM Watson Overpromised and Underdelivered on AI Health Care

#12

Don't want to sound too mean but this is not the first time IBM overpromised and underdelivered. Anyone surprised by this?

To be fair, IBM has succeeded at big jobs too. For instance, they developed software for the Apollo mission and the Space Shuttle. The IBM/360. The IBM PC. AS/400.

The IBM before around 1990 and today’s IBM are totally different companies. The only thing that’s the same is the name. Same could be said for HP.

Re: IBM Watson Overpromised and Underdelivered on AI Health Care

#13
post #8

> IBM > Overpromised and Underdelivered Sounds kind of catchy, to be honest.

If you could work in a clever bit about ageism and poor severance packages, you’d have a strong contender for IBM corporate mission statement.

Re: IBM Watson Overpromised and Underdelivered on AI Health Care

#15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, IBM has succeeded at big jobs too. For instance, they developed software for the Apollo mission and the Space Shuttle. The IBM/360. The IBM PC. AS/400.

I don't think there's anyone who disagrees that IBM was a great company once. Do you have a more recent example? something that happened several years after Louis Gerstner first assumed leadership.

They're still solid in the supercomputer space, no? BlueGene, and Summit and Sierra more recently are IBM projects.

Admittedly though given their pretty large size I can't name much else.

Re: IBM Watson Overpromised and Underdelivered on AI Health Care

#16
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was going to agree with you, but then my last name is Watson :-) Seriously, I used IBM Watson on a consulting project a little over two years ago and I was disappointed. To be fair I should take another look. IBM has bought some good companies whose work is exposed in BlueBiz and other web services and the permanent free tier levels they give away rival the free tier levels from GCP. I think AutoML and auto data sc…

IBM bit off more than they could chew with the AI/NLP project and their brand suffered as a consequence. Some problems are simply hard in the general case, though there are some spin-outs and spin-offs of that project for more limited domains that are successful.

Comparing the amount their brand suffered vs profits they may have come out ahead. AI got some real products from this hype cycle, but expectations where high enough that a crash was inevitable.

Re: IBM Watson Overpromised and Underdelivered on AI Health Care

#20
>”But Watson won’t change its conclusions based on just four patients. To solve this problem, the Sloan Kettering experts created “synthetic cases” that Watson could learn from, essentially make-believe patients with certain demographic profiles and cancer characteristics.”

Is this standard practice in machine learning? This sounds more like regular programming to get exactly the outcome you want.

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