IBM halting sales of Watson AI tool for drug discovery
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Re: IBM halting sales of Watson AI tool for drug discovery
#2I can’t read most of that article because it’s behind a paywall, but wow, is Watson just the largest attempt to sell vaporware of all time?? They had a super bowl ad!
A few friends from university were hired into the Watson team as hardly technical PMs. I have never heard any of them describe what Watson is or does.
Re: IBM halting sales of Watson AI tool for drug discovery
#3I can’t read most of that article because it’s behind a paywall, but wow, is Watson just the largest attempt to sell vaporware of all time?? They had a super bowl ad! A few friends from university were hired into the Watson team as hardly technical PMs. I have never heard any of them describe what Watson is or does.
I'm not sure I'd call it vaporware. I've not used it myself, but the more objective reports I've seen indicate that Watson is very good at what it does. The problem seems more to be what it does - accurately interpreting and then answering queries written in natural language - isn't actually that useful.
For example, for drug discovery: I'm guessing, off the cuff, that there are other drug discovery tools out there, and that, while they don't allow you to frame your searches in terms of natural language queries, that's probably not actually a problem in practice. Because the querying methods they've developed are presumably highly tuned to their real task, which is enabling a skilled and knowledgeable practitioner to specify what they're looking for with great precision.
It's sort of like programming languages: The ones that are designed to be the closest to natural language (e.g., AppleScript) do have a gentle learning curve for absolute beginners, but they also turn out to be some of the very worst languages for trying to do any sort of serious work.
Re: IBM halting sales of Watson AI tool for drug discovery
#4I have a friend who is an OB/GYN Oncologist in Indianapolis. Her hospital had IBM Watson Health on campus last year, and she mentioned to me in passing last month that they finally had kicked IBM off of their (learning) university's campus. When I asked her why, she said:
"Often times, Watson would recommend courses of treatment that would be completely incorrect, if not detrimental -- or even sometimes lethal -- to the patient. It became more of a hassle than a learning tool."
Re: IBM halting sales of Watson AI tool for drug discovery
#5I can’t read most of that article because it’s behind a paywall, but wow, is Watson just the largest attempt to sell vaporware of all time?? They had a super bowl ad! A few friends from university were hired into the Watson team as hardly technical PMs. I have never heard any of them describe what Watson is or does.
I’m running on prem instances of Watson and it’s far from vaporware but Watson has become more of a brand name. For the Watson product I use, It’s more of a wrapper to do AI and ML work, notebooks, containers and related tools for data science.
Re: IBM halting sales of Watson AI tool for drug discovery
#6I can’t read most of that article because it’s behind a paywall, but wow, is Watson just the largest attempt to sell vaporware of all time?? They had a super bowl ad! A few friends from university were hired into the Watson team as hardly technical PMs. I have never heard any of them describe what Watson is or does.
I'm not sure I'd call it vaporware. I've not used it myself, but the more objective reports I've seen indicate that Watson is very good at what it does. The problem seems more to be what it does - accurately interpreting and then answering queries written in natural language - isn't actually that useful. For example, for drug discovery: I'm guessing, off the cuff, that there are other drug discovery tools out there,…
Which is why data scientists use python instead of AppleScript.
Re: IBM halting sales of Watson AI tool for drug discovery
#7I can’t read most of that article because it’s behind a paywall, but wow, is Watson just the largest attempt to sell vaporware of all time?? They had a super bowl ad! A few friends from university were hired into the Watson team as hardly technical PMs. I have never heard any of them describe what Watson is or does.
I've commented this before, but Watson is nothing but branding for anything IBM does that is somewhat intelligent. There's pretty much no common technology between the different Watson products, so there's no 'core Watson' like many people believe.
Some products with Watson branding are great and industry leading. Others suck. The latter tend to appear in headlines and severely impact the brand they established with Jeopardy and their ads.
Re: IBM halting sales of Watson AI tool for drug discovery
#8I can’t read most of that article because it’s behind a paywall, but wow, is Watson just the largest attempt to sell vaporware of all time?? They had a super bowl ad! A few friends from university were hired into the Watson team as hardly technical PMs. I have never heard any of them describe what Watson is or does.
This is what IBM has always done. 20 years ago they pretended that their Deep Blue chess engine was in all their IT products. It's similar to how DeepMind AlphaGo is PR for Google's AI effort, but IBM takes it to comical extremes.
Re: IBM halting sales of Watson AI tool for drug discovery
#9I have a friend who is an OB/GYN Oncologist in Indianapolis. Her hospital had IBM Watson Health on campus last year, and she mentioned to me in passing last month that they finally had kicked IBM off of their (learning) university's campus. When I asked her why, she said: "Often times, Watson would recommend courses of treatment that would be completely incorrect, if not detrimental -- or even sometimes lethal -- to…
It's good we still have doctors to provide oversight for this sort of thing. Imagine a future where machines take over because they are thought to be smarter than doctors and then start killing people and their mistakes are written off because the people were already sick. Like an Elizabeth Holmes AI.
Re: IBM halting sales of Watson AI tool for drug discovery
#10I can’t read most of that article because it’s behind a paywall, but wow, is Watson just the largest attempt to sell vaporware of all time?? They had a super bowl ad! A few friends from university were hired into the Watson team as hardly technical PMs. I have never heard any of them describe what Watson is or does.
Watson is the branding term for an army of outsourced consultants (mostly in India) plugging away at the raw data.
Watson is not very good, and largely doesn't exist outside of slick marketing campaigns.