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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

#51

Post by owenmarshall »

bluedino wrote: post #24
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…

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"

> It got so bad our president (who's outof touch with tech)( called a meeting to see "how we are going to use watson"

Sounds like it was working perfectly!

I'm not even at an IBM shop and the Watson sales pitches are starting to reach C-level folks.

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

#52

Post by intuitionist »

acdc4life wrote: post #40
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.

Deep learning and machine learning don’t work. Quantitative math will always prevail, as it always has. Unfortunately, mathematical research isn’t there yet. We don’t have models for vision, audition and linguistics. Neuroscience and psychology are in their infancy, a good analogy would compare these fields to where physics was pre-Newton, Galileo era of understanding. I suspect that in the decades to come, these fie…

> Deep learning and machine learning don’t work. Quantitative math will always prevail, as it always has.

What do you think machine learning is, if not “quantitative math”? Deep learning is just linear algebra and calculus, and things like random forests are even simpler mathematically.

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

#53

Post by pickle-wizard »

i_am_nomad wrote: post #45
scrooched_moose wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

As a former IBMer I really like the POWER hardware. It is just a shame that it is made by IBM. Like you said IBM stuff is just too damn expensive.

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

#54

Post by QuackingJimbo »

acdc4life wrote: post #40
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.

Deep learning and machine learning don’t work. Quantitative math will always prevail, as it always has. Unfortunately, mathematical research isn’t there yet. We don’t have models for vision, audition and linguistics. Neuroscience and psychology are in their infancy, a good analogy would compare these fields to where physics was pre-Newton, Galileo era of understanding. I suspect that in the decades to come, these fie…

I agree that DL/ML is destined to fail in domains like this but can you expand on this reasoning? What exactly do you mean by "quantitative math" (I haven't heard this phrase used in this way before)? And what were the equivalents of DL/ML for physics before calculus?

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

#55

Post by bduerst »

acdc4life wrote: post #40
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.

Deep learning and machine learning don’t work. Quantitative math will always prevail, as it always has. Unfortunately, mathematical research isn’t there yet. We don’t have models for vision, audition and linguistics. Neuroscience and psychology are in their infancy, a good analogy would compare these fields to where physics was pre-Newton, Galileo era of understanding. I suspect that in the decades to come, these fie…

>Deep learning and machine learning don’t work. Quantitative math will always prevail,

I have a neural net onboard my phone which automatically detects songs offline and tells me what they are. Is that semantically 'quantitative math' and not machine learning?

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

#56

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

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

#58

Post by tellak »

euler_ wrote: post #11
devoply wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

I don’t understand this argument (which comes up often). Isn’t the answer an unqualified yes? It’s obvious the current system has fuck ups. Are we supposed to be happy if a new system has double or triple the fuckups because “technology”? Like where are you going with this? These clinical decision systems have not proven they improve outcomes and we have no reason to believe they won’t make things worse.

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

#59

Post by clarkmoody »

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.

EconTalk from last week[1] shed some light on the convoluted world of drug pricing and pharmaceutical patents. While I agree with your point that AI could help with medical progress, I would also emphasize that we're being held back by meat-space institutions as well (in this case, drug patents). One of the key takeaways was looking at the return on marginal investment in gaming the patent system vs developing new drugs. As firms achieve success, they become conservative, wishing to hold onto current profit levels. The patent system, as formulated, enables the drug company to make a meaningless change to a drug and receive an extended period of patent monopoly. This keeps out generics, raising prices, and reducing investment in drug research.

[1] http://www.econtalk.org/robin-feldman-on-drugs-money-and-sec...

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

#60

Post by lowdose »

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…

Thats why the average company on the s&p500 only survives 10 years so 75% will be whiped out in 10y. At the time ibm was founded the average company stock lifetime was +70 years. So maybe IBM won't die soon but their customers will with this attitude. Every company is a tech company today.
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