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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

#121

Post by [deleted] »

acdc4life wrote: post #100
intuitionist wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Machine learning is glorified curve fitting. DL isn't even mathematically sound, back propagation has no proof of convergence. Quantitative math is about extracting natural laws, and mapping them to mathematical structures. You could use DL to predict planetary motion, and get pretty good at it. But this isn't a quantitative understanding of the world. You didn't learn anything. Physics in contrast has the laws of mo…

[deleted]

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

#122

Post by dmix »

save_ferris wrote: post #71
skwb wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Even ignoring all the lack of deliverables, just the amount of financial trickery and lack of project oversight by the way money was pumped into it via philanthropy (instead of primary funding channels) which meant it bypassed multiple checks and balances, including from anyone knowledgeable of software development.

Sounds like every other failed $50+ million government software project ever, which IBM is apparently an expert at. Except this money donated by private citizens was redirected from other cancer research projects and siphoned into a billion dollar company’s coffers.

Really shameful stuff.

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

#123

Post by erikpukinskis »

m463 wrote: post #111
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.

You’re describing a person who has a huge amount of expertise in sales.

But a person like that can very lucratively sell actual products that already exist, so why would they want to sell this mysterious X?

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

#124

Post by VeninVidiaVicii »

darrin wrote: post #74
VeninVidiaVicii wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

It's MedHost with a lot of modifications specific to our hospital.

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

#125

Post by daenz »

foobiekr wrote: post #50

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.

https://i.imgur.com/FXi6NXb.jpg

According to the trend, we're approaching another AI Winter

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

#126

Post by hodgesrm »

Barrin92 wrote: post #65
foobiekr wrote: post #50

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.

Machine learning and neural net systems seem to be the inverse of the "uncanny valley", call it the "miraculous hill" if you will. They're just good enough to, with insane amount of computing resources, churn out economically viable results, but in my opinion they're the biggest setback in actually developing intelligence or cognition in a long time. There's very little insight to be gained from what they pick up, an…

ML and neural nets work surprisingly well on a lot of boring but important use cases. Optimizing online ad placement might be humdrum but it's the foundation of a $100B market in the US alone. [0]

In my opinion the real hype is that ML has become so popular that new practitioners tend to forget other analytic techniques like SQL data warehouses. Interestingly these are starting to absorb ML capabilities like logistic regression, which are now accessible through SQL and can benefit from MPP and vectorwise query execute in DBMS types like ClickHouse, Vertica, and Google BigQuery.

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/danafeldman/2018/03/28/u-s-tv-a...

Disclaimer: I work on ClickHouse.

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

#127

Post by wessorh »

Even Watson wasn't a general AI. Hearing all the anecdotes from folks that tried to use it.. Narrow AI has the attribute that it can't be ported from one field to another. It might win at Jepordy but sucks at Oncology and Drug Discovery. All AI isn't the same. We are general AI and we can solve problems in asymmetrically bad situations. Narrow AI is not portable

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

#128

Post by pjmorris »

bamboozled wrote: post #117
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 th…

> 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.

This.

In support of that idea, here's C.A.R. Hoare, from 'The Emperor's Old Clothes', the 1980 Turing Award lecture:

'At last, there breezed into my office the most senior manager of all, a general manager of our parent company, Andrew St. Johnston. I was surprised that he had even heard of me. "You know what went wrong?" he shouted--he always shouted-- "You let your programmers do things which you yourself do not understand." I stared in astonishment. He was obviously out of touch with present day realities. How could one person ever understand the whole of a modem software product like the Elliott 503 Mark II software system? I realized later that he was absolutely right; he had diagnosed the true cause of the problem and he had planted the seed of its later solution.'

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

#129

Post by throwawayjaksdk »

erikpukinskis wrote: post #123
m463 wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You’re describing a person who has a huge amount of expertise in sales. But a person like that can very lucratively sell actual products that already exist, so why would they want to sell this mysterious X?

Because the person is actually a business that:

a) employs enough scientists who know what they're doing and lawyers who know what they're doing to file relevant and defensible patents; and

b) has enough entrenched relationships that they can pay for a sales force what knows what they're doing; but

c) doesn't employ enough engineers who know what they're doing to develop actual competitive products around those patentable ideas.

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

#130

Post by intuitionist »

acdc4life wrote: post #100
intuitionist wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Machine learning is glorified curve fitting. DL isn't even mathematically sound, back propagation has no proof of convergence. Quantitative math is about extracting natural laws, and mapping them to mathematical structures. You could use DL to predict planetary motion, and get pretty good at it. But this isn't a quantitative understanding of the world. You didn't learn anything. Physics in contrast has the laws of mo…

If we’re throwing out anything that doesn’t have a proof of convergence as “not mathematically sound,” you can kiss fluid mechanics goodbye, as well as lots of other subfields of physics that rely on partial differential equations.
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