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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

#141

Post by Proven »

rincebrain wrote: post #91
i_am_nomad wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think these two statements can be reconciled: - IBM's hardware support is excellent to the point of being obsessive - IBM's support for anything that is not a hardware problem would be better-implemented by a 5 year old eating paste

Spectrum Scale is an IBM-made software app.

Fail.

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

#142

Post by wpasc »

skwb wrote: post #66
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.

I think there has to be tougher scrutiny for the tech we apply to healthcare. Us in the healthcare technology community have to have the guts to stand up and call out companies like theranos. If we don't, investors will come away thinking that healthcare is overly complicated and won't invest, and healthcare stakeholders will come to the conclusion that we don't actually care about their business practice or more imp…

How about easier barriers to entry with tougher reporting requirements? I personally fear the FDA is too optimized for bad headline avoidance to the detriment of allowing more experimental leeway. Not saying it should be the Wild West, just suggesting that perhaps the risk tolerance is currently too low. What if it were easier to perform more experiments, but if you hid/covered up any bad data there would be hell to pay?

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

#143

Post by ousta »

skwb wrote: post #70
clarkmoody wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

All the preclinical work is actually the cheap part of pharmaceutical development. Most of the costs come from the clinical trials for the FDA. Now a lot of the reason for this is that the US spends a pretty penny (and a lot of elbow grease from grad students) on basic biomedical research that's published into journals for "free" from the perspective of the pharmaceutical corporation. That said, if you can make clini…

it is a half baked truth. pharma want you to believe trials are expensive so they inflate crazily their costs to price their drugs high. but at the end when u try to sell them software they dont look at the inflates costs of trials be sure of that

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

#144

Post by throw2016 »

It seems just like crypto the 'ai' hype cycle is coming to an end with zero achievements to show for itself beyond puffery and premature speculation about radiologists, drivers and others losing their jobs.

And its not just hype, like crypto the ai hype stepped well beyond the line to outright fraud and deception with tech folks trying to pass off backward looking pattern matching as 'intelligence' and hope no one notices. Every single commentator here knows there is nothing in computing or software engineering today that will allow one to 'create' an 'ai' as the world understands the term yet no one questioned pushing intentionally deceptive communication.

This end result of dystopian scaremongering amounting to nothing is there is now zero credibility and extreme suspicion of problematic in-built bias. At the minimum there must be some standards for machine learning solutions to be thoroughly transparent, open to verification and exhaustively tested for racist and sexist bias before any rollout, for anyone who cares about the impact of their work in the real world.

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

#145

Post by chillacy »

darkpuma wrote: post #120
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.

You'd think they'd pair it up with a naive bayes classifier at least.

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

#146

Post by chillacy »

acdc4life wrote: post #94
QuackingJimbo wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Quantitative math might be the wrong word, maybe applied math? In quantitative finance, you make quantitative models about the world, and build math that realize those assumptions and understanding. A simple example: options are a great financial trading instrument that you can model mathematically, the simplest being the Black-Scholes model. You can imply things like volatility of the stock price based on the price…

1. Black-Scholes works in a lot of cases but is an approximation: it has edge cases where it does not fare well...

2. Likewise Newtonian physics is also an approximation: it does not fare well near relativistic speeds or high gravity. But at least we have models which seem to be accurate to many decimal places today. Who knows what the future may hold.

3. Not all useful problems can be represented by simple equations, but they can be computed analytically (e.g. N-body problem).

4. Ultimately DL is popular because it works better than anything else in some very specific domains like speech recognition and image recognition. It is overapplied I'll admit, but if you can do better then feel free to publish a paper.

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

#147

Post by chillacy »

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.

I've seen startups with zero AI (beyond rule based algorithms) call their product AI because it attracts investors. So I can vouch for that.

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

#148

Post by chillacy »

acdc4life wrote: post #114
sonnyblarney wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 n…

Because DL isn't great at NLP (and may never solve "real conversations" aka AGI), it's worthless?

It's the best performing tool we have for NLP, image recognition, etc. Is it a local maxima? Probably. But it's out there solving real problems nonetheless. We'll capture all the gains we can and then move on after.

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

#149

Post by jammygit »

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.

I work at a startup that uses machine learning for medical purposes (junior position). My biased impression is that the interest in this tech is growing rapidly and not even IBM can ruin it. IBMs problems might be good in a sense if it leads hospital networks to experiment more with the offerings of up-and-coming companies with more reliable offerings.

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

#150

Post by jammygit »

pickle-wizard wrote: post #53
i_am_nomad wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I know about it from the Raptor PC team and their Foss compatible microcode. Would you say it holds its own performance/reliablilty wise with competitors?
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