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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

#71

Post by save_ferris »

skwb wrote: post #37
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…

These are only a few data points in a almost half decade of promising for healthcare solutions and failing to meet those expectations. The MD Anderson audit is particularly bad: https://www.utsystem.edu/sites/default/files/documents/UT%20...

Wow, they didn't waste any time in that executive summary. Those bullet points are insane on their own.

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

#72

Post by jboles »

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…

You can sort of tell this from the style of IBM's TV ads, which have a condescending and smarmy tone that is quite distinctive.

The ads are filled with lofty buzzwords. No talk of actual technology at all, because the ads are targetted at non-technical management, the kinds of people who might be euphemistically called "decision-makers". The ads make all kinds of promises to these "decision-makers" about how their business will be utterly transformed. Actual implementation of the systems and business-critical changes is left to the IT department. The non-technical management writes a cheque and then washes their hands of the problem.

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

#73

Post by mindfulplay »

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…

It almost feels like these two corporations (IBM and Oracle) and giant marketing, consulting and legal firms than technology firms.

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

#74

Post by darrin »

VeninVidiaVicii wrote: post #16
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.

That's really interesting. I work in the emergency room, and pretty much our entire approach up patient care is algorithm-driven. As soon as the patient checks in, their demographics (age, sex, etc) and vitals are fed into a mysterious program, which suggests an acuity level, and basically drives the whole course of treatment. The patient is required to be tested for a variety of disease processes based on the AI-gen…

What program is that? Is that something Epic/Cerner/whatever does, or some add-on?

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

#75

Post by distant_hat »

Slightly over a year back, we were contacted by IBM to try out Watson under some program for startups. Starting out, they asked us to give them a try. We gave them a NLP related task and they were confident they would be able to do a good job of it. After multiple meetings over the next 2 months, they barely produced any useful output. In the meantime, an intern with us got a pretty decent solution using just Python. Our management did get invited to lunches and meetings for selling them some more products. During one of such invitations, since our CEO couldn't make it, I was sent. I was surprised by how shoddy their presentation was given that I thought they might not be doing a good job on the problem we gave them but they should be slick on the selling side. Their presentation seemed like it was out of 2005 or something.

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

#76

Post by JacobDotVI »

eesmith wrote: post #67
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.

AI has been applied to healthcare technology since the 1970s, like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mycin and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CADUCEUS_(expert_system) . One failure by one company, even IBM, won't stop future attempts.

There was even an Artificial Intelligence in Medicine Symposium held in 1979 -

https://blog.jacob.vi/an-80s-throwback-artificial-intelligen...

In response to the above blog - Watson's early small-scale success clearly hasn't scaled to bigger and broader applications.

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

#77

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

tellak wrote: post #58
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.

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.

"We successfully automated lethal incompetence" is perhaps not the most appealing of all possible USPs for a medical system.

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

#78

Post by c0mpute »

distant_hat wrote: post #75

Slightly over a year back, we were contacted by IBM to try out Watson under some program for startups. Starting out, they asked us to give them a try. We gave them a NLP related task and they were confident they would be able to do a good job of it. After multiple meetings over the next 2 months, they barely produced any useful output. In the meantime, an intern with us got a pretty decent solution using just Python.…

What do you think of your CEO now :)?

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

#79

Post by justwalt »

nintendo95 wrote: post #44
apohn wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 te…

What did you end up doing in a period of non-work work like that? Read books?

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

#80

Post by dllthomas »

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…

I miss Chef Watson.
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