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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

#21

Post by wpasc »

gowld wrote: post #8
sambroner wrote: post #2

I 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.

I agree with you that IBM is full of shit, Google too to a degree, but Google has used AI in a variety of their products even down to data center cooling processes. I don't think IBM and Google are comparable in this respect.

Re: IBM halting sales of Watson AI tool for drug discovery

#22

Post by elliekelly »

sodosopa wrote: post #5
sambroner wrote: post #2

I 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.

Same here. And so far I have to say I'm quite happy with it. Is it the best tool for ML? Probably not. But it's certainly the easiest I've found so far and it works for what I'm using it for.

Re: IBM halting sales of Watson AI tool for drug discovery

#23

Post by PedroBatista »

wpasc wrote: post #19

I sincerely hope IBM's failures do not deter further progress in trying to innovate in healthcare technology. I believe healthcare vitally needs GOOD/USEFUL technology and AI applications because medical progress is not advancing quickly enough by several metrics. I hope IBM continues to fail and becomes a case study in the failure of massive bureaucracy.

IBM will not fail, Oracle will fail first than IBM and that's unlikely to happen.

You see, they are NOT tech companies. They have something you would call "tech", they sell something that looks like "tech" but they really solve problems people with access to large amounts of money have.

In other words, they produce cushy and warm beds for C-level execs to have a good night of sleep, and everyone needs some bed to sleep every night..

Technology is a risky and volatile business and IBM has more than 100 years in business.

Re: IBM halting sales of Watson AI tool for drug discovery

#24

Post by bluedino »

donkeyd wrote: post #7
sambroner wrote: post #2

I 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…

My last employer was an IBM customer, so of course we recieved all kinds of material in the mail or marketing calls trying to sell us on 'Watson'. It got so bad our president (who's outof touch with tech)( called a meeting to see "how we are going to use watson"

Re: IBM halting sales of Watson AI tool for drug discovery

#25

Post by freehunter »

ethbro wrote: post #13
euler_ wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does it make a difference if they preform better than human docs? The same thing happens now with human docs.

The difference is the expectation of fallibility with human docs. Which is why checks are built into the system. I have zero trust in IBM to market their ML products correctly so that proper checks are maintained. Especially since technically, explainability is still an active area of ML research.

>I have zero trust in IBM to market their ML products correctly so that proper checks are maintained.

That's a problem, yes, but it's not a new one. Vendor management has been around for decades, centuries, millennia maybe. If I contract out part of my job, it's still my responsibility to make sure the contractors are doing their job right. "But their marketing said..." or "but their sales guys said..." is not an excuse and everyone knows that.

Doctors noticing that Watson is wrong is expected. Doctors missing the fact that Waston is wrong is a failure of that doctor and the doctor who didn't check the results is the responsible party. The checks don't come from Watson, the checks come from humans who oversee Watson.

If Watson is wrong often enough that it's hindering the doctors, then kicking it out is the right call. But there can never be an argument of "Watson got the diagnosis wrong and that's why the patient died" because ultimately IBM is still just a vendor and Watson is still just a contractor.

Re: IBM halting sales of Watson AI tool for drug discovery

#26

Post by IshKebab »

tolstoy77 wrote: post #20

a lot of these AI companies products are really terrible. Has anyone ever tried the AI API models from clarifai ? Just so unaccurate. It seems like a scam. I've also had a really bad experience with watson's speech to text apis.

Yeah their speech recognition API was by far the worst of the ~5 I tested a few years ago. Like, almost as bad as Sphinx.

Re: IBM halting sales of Watson AI tool for drug discovery

#27

Post by linuxftw »

tolstoy77 wrote: post #20

a lot of these AI companies products are really terrible. Has anyone ever tried the AI API models from clarifai ? Just so unaccurate. It seems like a scam. I've also had a really bad experience with watson's speech to text apis.

I'm pretty sure it's all a big scam, at least the crap that comes out of IBM.

Re: IBM halting sales of Watson AI tool for drug discovery

#28

Post by pm90 »

PedroBatista wrote: post #23
wpasc wrote: post #19

I sincerely hope IBM's failures do not deter further progress in trying to innovate in healthcare technology. I believe healthcare vitally needs GOOD/USEFUL technology and AI applications because medical progress is not advancing quickly enough by several metrics. I hope IBM continues to fail and becomes a case study in the failure of massive bureaucracy.

IBM will not fail, Oracle will fail first than IBM and that's unlikely to happen. You see, they are NOT tech companies. They have something you would call "tech", they sell something that looks like "tech" but they really solve problems people with access to large amounts of money have. In other words, they produce cushy and warm beds for C-level execs to have a good night of sleep, and everyone needs some bed to sle…

Spot on.

IBM really does capitalize on the adage of nobody being fired for buying IBM. Their biggest strength has been in their marketing rather than actual technology.

Note that, being a large org, they do have teams doing excellent work too. IBM research, some of the cloud, design etc. teams seem to be doing good stuff. But most of it is still overpromising and underdelivering while charging clients a lot of cash.

Re: IBM halting sales of Watson AI tool for drug discovery

#30

Post by pmart123 »

tolstoy77 wrote: post #20

a lot of these AI companies products are really terrible. Has anyone ever tried the AI API models from clarifai ? Just so unaccurate. It seems like a scam. I've also had a really bad experience with watson's speech to text apis.

Watson’s is awful. Google’s default models are by far the best followed by Microsoft at a distance. Then, many of them are so bad that it is laughable.
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