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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

#111

Post by m463 »

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.…

You know, it would be very profitable for someone to profess an expertise in X, reach out to various companies to help them use X to solve their problems, then simultaneously gain experience in X while patenting the heck out of any problems solved with X.

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

#112

Post by bduerst »

acdc4life wrote: post #97
bduerst wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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?

Quantitative math, or applied math isn't based on fitting data to an arbitrary mathematical structure. It's looking at real life, and deriving the mathematical laws that govern what you see. You could have a neural net predict planetary motion. However, it doesn't know jack shit about physics. >I have a neural net onboard my phone which automatically detects songs offline and tells me what they are. MP3 uses somethin…

>If actual mathematicians worked on this problem,

This is a No True Scotsman. Actual mathematicians did work on this problem, training the neural network to achieve it's target task of identifying songs using minimal power and storage consumption - which works.

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

#113

Post by mlinksva »

clarkmoody wrote: post #59
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 dr…

The week before that was even more incisive http://www.econtalk.org/jacob-stegenga-on-medical-nihilism/

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

#114

Post by acdc4life »

sonnyblarney wrote: post #98
acdc4life wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If you mean for medical diagnosis, maybe, but you do realize that NN/AI is totally state of the art for many tasks? NLP, image recognition etc. ? AI is in a hype bubble right now surely, but it's a 'very real' thing that's going to infiltrate a lot of areas.

>you do realize that NN/AI is totally state of the art for many tasks?

Being state of the art doesn't imply that these things will solve these problems. In ML terms, how do you know that NN/AI isn't a local maxima that we need to jump out of? All NLP systems are joke. Sure replace Watson with DL, might perform better on Jeopardy. But in real conversations? Forget it.

I wouldn't bet on these things. NN will win, but not the back propagation, ReLu, sigmoid or whatever pseudo science that is the current buzzword. There is 50 years worth of understanding in actual neuroscience and cognitive modelling that no one has paid attention to, and new design principles are emerging that will influence mathematics.

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

#115

Post by bduerst »

mattnewport wrote: post #106
bduerst wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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?

Which app is that? Most of the well known music identification apps like Shazam use acoustic fingerprinting to identify songs. They work well without using neural nets or deep learning. What benefits does your neural net based app offer over this well known approach? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acoustic_fingerprint

It uses both - the neural network creates it's own acoustic fingerprint database, which it then uses to perceive sound. This shrinks the traditional acoustic fingerprinting data enough to be stored on mobile devices, while allowing for a low-power "always-on" identification offline.

It's analogous to a human being able to identify songs by remembering the chorus, just that the NN uses it's own features for both the memory and offline perception.

>In 2017 we launched Now Playing on the Pixel 2, using deep neural networks to bring low-power, always-on music recognition to mobile devices. In developing Now Playing, our goal was to create a small, efficient music recognizer which requires a very small fingerprint for each track in the database, allowing music recognition to be run entirely on-device without an internet connection.

https://ai.googleblog.com/2018/09/googles-next-generation-mu...

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

#116

Post by burtonator »

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…

Reminds me of this:

https://techcrunch.com/2009/09/02/netbase-thinks-you-can-get...

... granted this happened a decade ago:

> "Several of our readers tested out the site and found that healthBase’s semantic search engine has some major glitches (see the comments). One of the most unfortunate examples is when you type in a search for “AIDS,” one of the listed causes of the disease is “Jew.”

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

#117

Post by bamboozled »

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.…

This is a common pattern everywhere unfortunately. Snake oil salesmen and their victims.

I have daily skirmishes at my company with our CTO and his subordinates who constantly want to believe snake oil salesmen because they’re looking for simple ways outs of hard problems. It’s really sad.

For some it seems easier to -_trust_ a dude with a power point presentation and no real experience over good engineers telling the truth and trying to help them for real.

I now think it’s madness for anyone to be in charge of anything if they don’t have relevant experience in the relevant domain. Nice people or not, they’re susceptible to bullshit.

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

#118

Post by duxup »

There have been a couple articles that a lot of issues with Watson was how it was sold. Watson was being sold as sort of a magic drop in solution that could do oh so many things.

In reality Watson took a great deal of work to carefully structure and process data, evaluation of the output, and more thoughtful of approaches to further refine the information and evaluate outputs. It also required a fair amount of involvement with the individual customer's staff. And there was always the possibility that because each use case was different... it simply wouldn't work out.

To some extent it seems like it should have been sold as a journey... not cookie cuter solution for things that Watson had never encountered before.

How do you sell that, I don't know, if I knew I'd probabbly be a pretty good salesman.

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

#119

Post by tomrod »

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.…

This sounds like this is a common problem for Watson's go-to market strategy.

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

#120

Post by darkpuma »

batmansmk wrote: post #87

Watson is more a marketing term than a technical connection between products. I invite you to test "Watson Tone Analyzer" https://tone-analyzer-demo.ng.bluemix.net/ : - "I like this product." => "this is an analytical opinion with neutral emotion." - "I like it" => "Tentative, 50% happy answer." - "It's not a bad product." => "analytical". - "It's not a bad tool" => "joyful answer".

- "Spiders are not insects." => "fear"

Exactly what I expected, and also flat wrong.

- "There's a monster under my bed." => "joy"

Fascinating.

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