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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

#71

Post by SCAQTony »

altmind wrote: post #50
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.

Watson should rebrand then. You can't have a colossal failure such as the one reported by Stat News: “multiple examples of unsafe and incorrect treatment recommendations.” — [Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center] and expect to move on from it as if they were growing pains.

Re: IBM Watson Overpromised and Underdelivered on AI Health Care

#72

Post by ethbro »

Rexxar wrote: post #62
randomsearch wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When Google first arrived, I’d say the improvement was way more than 20%. Did you experience that?

Search was not a mature industry at all.

I'd definitely include that as a qualifier to the rule.

Mature and/or competitive.

20%+ without a breakthrough can absolutely happen in niche industries that have historically lacked competition.

Re: IBM Watson Overpromised and Underdelivered on AI Health Care

#73

Post by ethbro »

hopler wrote: post #65
1e-9 wrote: post #21

To me, the main mistake was the series of commercials giving the strong impression that IBM already had this incredible Artificial General Intelligence that was indistinguishable from a highly intelligent human and was solving a myriad of difficult practical problems better than any expert. I suspect that most who were well-versed in AI felt the ads were disingenuous from the start. I know I did. I think the marketin…

IBM have been doing this since Deep Blue, if not older. It's their core business model: build cool tech demos and then sell consulting deployments that use nonexistent features of the tech

> sell consulting deployments that use nonexistent features of the tech

Sell consulting deployments that hope to fund development of promised features of the tech.

Consulting is a bit like used car selling. If you're not playing close to the line, then someone else is.

Which, okay. Is what it is. But every customer should be aware this is what IBM et al.'s business model is, unless you're simply buying bodies.

Re: IBM Watson Overpromised and Underdelivered on AI Health Care

#74

Post by ethbro »

jackfoxy wrote: post #67
dre85 wrote: post #66

I always find it kind of silly when AI is just thrown into a field with the notion that they'll just deal with the messy, subjective and unstructured data (like hand written medical notes for example) as is. For me it makes much more sense to try to clean up and structure the data from the start instead. Maybe come up with some data acquisition compromise that is both UX friendly and give rise to more structure and c…

My company does machine learning checked by physical models. Our single biggest problem (and management is finally waking up to it) is curating the incoming data. And this is in a mature industry (oil & gas).

My biggest surprise has been how little everyone is aware of their data quality.

The only explanation I've been able to come up with is that when it's all human processed, Joe 2nd-link-in-the-chain just deals with all the inconsistencies as best he can to get his job done, and never reports issues up.

Re: IBM Watson Overpromised and Underdelivered on AI Health Care

#75

Post by kochikame »

seibelj wrote: post #43
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.

The hype around blockchain is far more than just cryptocurrencies, which have done well by many measures.

The person you're replying to is saying that all the hype around blockchain for contracts, identifiers etc. is most likely way overblown and we will look back in a few years and see it as a mostly useless fad

Re: IBM Watson Overpromised and Underdelivered on AI Health Care

#76

Post by kochikame »

imglorp wrote: post #5

Not sure about Watson, but there was just this week a story about using pattern matching to improve breast cancer screening imaging. It seems the tech is decent but the problem is, it's unclear whom to sue if needed, so there's an obstacle to using it.

If they'd marketed it this way from the beginning it would have been fine. AI is great at that kind of pattern-matching.

The problem is that Watson was sold as a kind of "AI Doctor", which is pretty much ludicrous

Re: IBM Watson Overpromised and Underdelivered on AI Health Care

#77

Post by smnrchrds »

scrooched_moose wrote: post #54
Waterluvian wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my opinion you don't even need to be an expert. - if you're a generally competent, learned person - and the new product feels like a giant leap from anything that exists already - it's likely not all it claims to be.

I've always had a 20% threshold If anyone is promising a 20% or greater improvement over the current leaders, I immediately file it away as a scam until I see extraordinary proof. Other than some very immature industries, even 20% leaps don't happen without earth shattering once-in-a-generation breakthroughs. Some call me a pessimist, and occasionally I'm unfairly dismissive of new technologies. But for every one I g…

How do you define immature? AI seems to be quite immature even compared to other subjects in computer science, which is as a whole quite young.

Re: IBM Watson Overpromised and Underdelivered on AI Health Care

#78

Post by ethbro »

SCAQTony wrote: post #71
altmind wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Watson should rebrand then. You can't have a colossal failure such as the one reported by Stat News: “multiple examples of unsafe and incorrect treatment recommendations.” — [Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center] and expect to move on from it as if they were growing pains.

I call this the Netflix ML effect.

If your answer is mission critical, probabilistic ML isn't advanced, explainable, or reliable enough for your problem.

If your answer is of the great-to-be-right, meh-to-be-wrong sort (e.g. ranking movie recommendations), then you can and should go nuts with ML.

And if someone really wants to do an ML project on the former, do everything you can to transform it into the latter.

Re: IBM Watson Overpromised and Underdelivered on AI Health Care

#79

Post by evrydayhustling »

1e-9 wrote: post #21

To me, the main mistake was the series of commercials giving the strong impression that IBM already had this incredible Artificial General Intelligence that was indistinguishable from a highly intelligent human and was solving a myriad of difficult practical problems better than any expert. I suspect that most who were well-versed in AI felt the ads were disingenuous from the start. I know I did. I think the marketin…

The commercials are the public-facing tip of a much larger iceburg of enterprise-scale sales and marketing. Big institutions gave Watson a shot because they created a machine that maximized FOMO with intriguing demos, reduced risk with the "nobody gets fired for buying IBM effect", and perhaps most importantly pitches projects that were large enough to move the needle and make the career of a high level administrator.

When you realize how much positioning is required for large scale sales, you can start to understand why the same company might not have the feedback loops in place to build a product.

Re: IBM Watson Overpromised and Underdelivered on AI Health Care

#80

Post by scottlegrand2 »

scrooched_moose wrote: post #54
Waterluvian wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my opinion you don't even need to be an expert. - if you're a generally competent, learned person - and the new product feels like a giant leap from anything that exists already - it's likely not all it claims to be.

I've always had a 20% threshold If anyone is promising a 20% or greater improvement over the current leaders, I immediately file it away as a scam until I see extraordinary proof. Other than some very immature industries, even 20% leaps don't happen without earth shattering once-in-a-generation breakthroughs. Some call me a pessimist, and occasionally I'm unfairly dismissive of new technologies. But for every one I g…

CUDA delivered a 10x to 100x performance boost on legacy code for real. The hardware had been capable of doing this for at least a generations previously but it lacked a few operations to make it accessible and efficient.

What I think made people miss it is no one wanted to refactor their code to run efficiently on GPUs. It wasn't that hard to do so in a lot of cases but it was work.

And all this set the stage for deep learning. It was the opening act if you will...

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