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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

#41

Post by m_ke »

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 was an early clarifai employee and although I can't speak for what's there now, up until 2-3 years ago they had one of the most accurate models available (with google being the only real competitor).

The generally available models will almost always be suboptimal due to the difference in the data that they're trained on vs the data that clients use it on. That's why most of these AI companies end up doing a ton of consulting and build specialized models for larger customers.

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

#42

Post by cirgue »

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…

Watson is a constellation of consulting services and software. It's basically a marketing meme.

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

#43

Post by ethbro »

freehunter wrote: post #25
ethbro wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 exc…

The difference is like:like vs like:unlike, and seems to be one of the more dangerous ML application challenges.

If I as a medical provider hire a remote vendor, who has medical teams in India look over initial results to flag issues, those humans will fail in human ways. I can anticipate that: I'm a human.

If I use a similar ML product, it's very difficult for me to anticipate (or even understand) the ways it which it might / does fail. Which makes it unlike my previous experience. Which gives it a fundamentally different risk profile.

It's the Boeing issue in a nutshell: the failure case that unfolded was unlike the scenarios the pilots were trained for. Unfortunately, in the two crashes they were unable to dynamically RCA quickly enough to solve the problem.

My point was that coupled with IBM's inept and inaccurate marketing, it seems unlikely the appropriate risk information is in the hands of those responsible for managing risk.

And honestly, if a system has unlimited failure modes, and I can't learn and limit them in practice, it's useless.

Because in that scenario I should be duplicating all the work it's done to ensure it didn't go off the rails. In practice (and guided by labor cost savings promised in the contract signed with management), that full verification doesn't happen (because the vendor is incentivized to recommend it doesn't), and people die.

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

#44

Post by nintendo95 »

apohn wrote: post #18
donkeyd wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I suspect what happened was that Watson started out as a single product or focused suite of products. I'm just guessing, but then as the marketing induced hype started and growth/results were not on target , they realized there was a lot of interest in Watson so IBM pivoted and started rolling everything under the Watson brand - products, consulting, cloud stuff, etc. Basically that way they could say Watson was a "s…

I worked there (Watson Health) a few years back. All that happened is IBM. That's right. They bought us (a small start-up) and this is what they did in a year to us: 1. replaced managers with their own who didn't get anything, kind of old date executives taken away from mainframe 2. banned remote work (this costed them a few brilliant engineers) 3. opened one huge open space full of noise and chatter, I mean sales team next to the development team, etc (this cost them even more headcount among experienced developers) 4. For months we did nothing! There were whole teams doing nothing for months on an end. I wrote zero lines of code in over 6 month period. Why? Because management didn't know which direction should be taken... and they kept hiring too! They kept hiring new developers when the ones already at place had absolutely nothing to do!

This is from my (simple developer) perspective. Not sure how it looked in sales, among executives, etc. But that was very weird environment.

I had great Manager who asked me to learn react and take courses in react (mind you it was two years back!) As we "might want to do something in react in the future". So I basically spent my last six months there learning React, aka preparing to the job interviews... they even got us paid courses and all. I mean... IBM.

And once they fired me (these were lay-offs, thousands affected, many of them just hired in past year, like myself) I was paid severance pay too. I went there worked a year, last 6 months was learning for job interviews... fantastic pay too. IBM is crazy.

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

#45

Post by i_am_nomad »

scrooched_moose wrote: post #39
exelius wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is less true than it used to be. Oracle/SAP are largely recognized as multi-billion dollar technology quagmires these days; integration has become so much easier that cobbling together a bunch of SaaS solutions to replace a centralized ERP is a viable approach. Likewise, IBM has become known as a vaporware vendor. They combine the worst parts of management consulting with an offshore / outsourced development pro…

IBM has been banned from our data center for several years. The decision was before my time, but the answer I've been told is overly expensive, unreliable, and poor support when compared to other vendors.

In my experience, IBM’s support is excellent, bordering on fanatical. It’s just that their hardware (in this case, Spectrum Scale and Power9) are preposterously overpriced. Same for their software, if not more so.

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

#46

Post by plttn »

Waterluvian wrote: post #38
imroot wrote: post #4

I 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…

This reminds me of a bit in the first The Expanse book I read recently. The onboard medical computer had to be overridden because it calculated coldly that the correct course of treatment was palliative care.

Given the context of that scene, it was more an indication of how much characters A and B had been affected by the situation.

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

#47

Post by Waterluvian »

plttn wrote: post #46
Waterluvian wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This reminds me of a bit in the first The Expanse book I read recently. The onboard medical computer had to be overridden because it calculated coldly that the correct course of treatment was palliative care.

Given the context of that scene, it was more an indication of how much characters A and B had been affected by the situation.

Yeah. Not trying to draw a parallel. Just reminded me of sci fi.

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

#48

Post by coldtea »

tabtab wrote: post #33
imroot wrote: post #4

I 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 purpose of such a system should be to give leads for further research. If you treat them as leads and only leads, then bad leads don't matter much. Unless, the leads are so bad on average that too much effort is spent on vetting them that could be put to better use elsewhere.

>The purpose of such a system should be to give leads for further research. If you treat them as leads and only leads, then bad leads don't matter much.

If the leads are worse than a random toss of a coin, then you can come up with leads on your own.

Not all leads are good. Inviting the village idiot in a brainstorming session wont be of much value -- and Watson is more like the village idiot, than a valid lead generation engine.

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

#50

Post by foobiekr »

Slowly, I am noticing that people are starting to question the abilities of machine learning systems and, in particular, seeing a lot of the transparent AI-washing that is now going on for systems that aren't AI at all. This is one of the most positive changes in the tech industry, honestly.
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