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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

#41

Post by mindslight »

jacquesm wrote: post #7
mark_l_watson wrote: post #6

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.

Isn't arbitraging off developed brands just a common contemporary playbook?

Re: IBM Watson Overpromised and Underdelivered on AI Health Care

#42

Post by xiphias2 »

mark_l_watson wrote: post #6
jacquesm wrote: post #3

Anything labelled 'Watson' should be seen as marketing, not product or consulting.

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…

The big difference with Google and AutoML is that Google was already doing lots of machine learning in the past, just not deep learning.

With deep learning it took the transition seriously internally as well: there's a huge push to get all models to use Tensorflow - even if the transition itself is painful - and this helps the infrastructure providers as well to gather feedback.

With IBM it all started as a very successful research project, but instead of working more on the Watson system, it decided to rename dumber projects to be under the Watson umbrella as well thereby giving the impression that it's the same system that won in Jeopardy.

Re: IBM Watson Overpromised and Underdelivered on AI Health Care

#43

Post by seibelj »

taylodl wrote: post #14

I figure we’re going to be reading articles similar to this about blockchain in a couple of years.

The fact Bitcoin is worth $90 billion and has survived a decade of endless criticism, means blockchain is successful beyond anyone's wildest dreams a decade ago. I would say Bitcoin and Ethereum have been way more successful than Watson has.

Re: IBM Watson Overpromised and Underdelivered on AI Health Care

#44

Post by peteradio »

maxxxxx wrote: post #12
PaulHoule wrote: post #9

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.

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.

Excuse me but the logo is also the same. ;)

Re: IBM Watson Overpromised and Underdelivered on AI Health Care

#45

Post by marmaduke »

Ensorceled wrote: post #29
qwerty456127 wrote: post #19

What actually is so hard about AI in health care? Why not just take a set of diagnostic indicators for inputs, map to conditions/treatments as outputs and train a neural net?

The problem is that the numerous easy cases do not result in a useful network ... any 1st-year intern will get the easy results already. The hard cases, which would be useful to a doctor, occur very rarely. My father's unusual reaction to a post-bypass drug regimen was something like the 3rd time that happened in Canada. How do you "train" that into a neural network?

I work on an ML project on epilepsy, and this happened all the time. Additionally what the clinicians saw as easy/boring wasn’t always te case for the model.

Re: IBM Watson Overpromised and Underdelivered on AI Health Care

#46

Post by Randypea »

I was recently diagnosed with neuroendocrine cancer, which my PCP had been misdiagnosed for 10 years as IBS. This is more the norm than the exception for people with this type of cancer, Steve Jobs included. It's a perfect example of where AI can likely diagnosis what my PCP could not. AI tools need to find cancer problems to solve which are more suited to their capabilities. e.g. does anybody know of a company working on "AI for cancer screening"? This is desperately needed and would have helped me.

Re: IBM Watson Overpromised and Underdelivered on AI Health Care

#47

Post by return0 »

bitcharmer wrote: post #2

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

Yep they are e.g. overhyping their neurmorphic platform too

I hope that's not the case for their quantum computer

Re: IBM Watson Overpromised and Underdelivered on AI Health Care

#48

Post by sumoboy »

The best reference about Watson last year was on reddit, "Watson is a brand, not a "thing". It covers any technologies that IBM sells in the cognitive space. They are further broken up into the business areas."

All hype and marketing built on open source tools, all while AWS, Google, and Azure build out bigger cloud offerings. As OP mentioned, they used to be a great company.

Re: IBM Watson Overpromised and Underdelivered on AI Health Care

#49

Post by return0 »

maxander wrote: post #36

A bunch of the projects described, and the (technical) difficulties encountered, make me wonder if GPT-2-style systems would have better odds. Is anyone looking into applying that to medical/scientific text NLP problems? I mean, GPT-2 still often produces nonsense more similar to dream imagery than useful reasoning, but I gather most medical residency students are half-asleep most of the time anyway, so... :)

> still often produces nonsense more similar to dream imagery than useful reasoning,

Is there any example of gpt-2 in the wild that is not nonsense?

Re: IBM Watson Overpromised and Underdelivered on AI Health Care

#50

Post by altmind »

sumoboy wrote: post #48

The best reference about Watson last year was on reddit, "Watson is a brand, not a "thing". It covers any technologies that IBM sells in the cognitive space. They are further broken up into the business areas." All hype and marketing built on open source tools, all while AWS, Google, and Azure build out bigger cloud offerings. As OP mentioned, they used to be a great company.

I've heard some day: "Watson is a brand name for IBM consulancy services". These people formulate what watson is for your specific business.
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