IBM halting sales of Watson AI tool for drug discovery • Hacker News Board

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

#171

Post by freehunter » Fri, Apr 19, 2019, 5:32 PM UTC

ethbro wrote: post #43

freehunter wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I have zero trust in IBM to market their ML products correctly so that proper checks are maintained. That's a problem, yes, but it's not a new one. Vendor management has been around for decades, centuries, millennia maybe. If I contract out part of my job, it's still my responsibility to make sure the contractors are doing their job right. "But their marketing said..." or "but their sales guys said..." is not an exc…

The difference is like:like vs like:unlike, and seems to be one of the more dangerous ML application challenges. If I as a medical provider hire a remote vendor, who has medical teams in India look over initial results to flag issues, those humans will fail in human ways. I can anticipate that: I'm a human. If I use a similar ML product, it's very difficult for me to anticipate (or even understand) the ways it which…

It's a good point that it's a failure of management. It almost always is in situations like this.

I design and deploy customized automation systems for customers, and it's part of the standard process that we run the automation side-by-side with the old process for several months in order to learn the new failure methods and synchronize the process. Yes, for a few months we're duplicating the machine's work, but without the machine we'd be doing the work anyway. And no one is going to die if my automation fails, but we still do this anyway. It's crazy to think anyone would believe they didn't need to do side-by-side verification no matter what sales and marketing told them.

I don't know enough about Watson or IBM sales to say if Watson is good or bad, but I'm not trying to defend Watson or IBM. Watson may very well be a complete failure. But that aside, it's not the only failure in this story. No one should expect to implement a new tool and never verify if it's working correctly.

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

#172

Post by pmart123 » Fri, Apr 19, 2019, 5:52 PM UTC

gbersac wrote: post #165

pmart123 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Watson’s is awful. Google’s default models are by far the best followed by Microsoft at a distance. Then, many of them are so bad that it is laughable.

Do you have any insight about AWS IA ?

Haven’t tried it actually yet.

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

#173

Post by pmart123 » Fri, Apr 19, 2019, 6:02 PM UTC

gbersac wrote: post #165

pmart123 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Watson’s is awful. Google’s default models are by far the best followed by Microsoft at a distance. Then, many of them are so bad that it is laughable.

Do you have any insight about AWS IA ?

I tested most of the solutions a year or two ago before AWS rolled out Amazon Comprehend. I found that Google’s API combined with some code and open source packages ended up being additive for entity recognition, classification, and semantic text. Unsurprisingly, Google’s custom search API’s are also worlds better than the other places, as is it’s Maps API. I haven’t tried any of the image classification API’s, but I won’t be surprised if Google won here too.

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

#174

Post by ackfoo » Fri, Apr 19, 2019, 6:07 PM UTC

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

#175

Post by acdc4life » Fri, Apr 19, 2019, 6:14 PM UTC

throw2016 wrote: post #144

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 no…

There is no "ai", it's the same bull crap we had in the 80s. We haven't had true innovation in this space for a very long time, the current hype was caused by GPU, cloud, and abundance of data for training.

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

#176

Post by wetmore » Fri, Apr 19, 2019, 6:34 PM UTC

acdc4life wrote: post #110

sonnyblarney wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

" If actual mathematicians worked on this problem, I guarantee you they'd do a better job" No, this is wrong. Some of the most brilliant people in the world have been working on image recognition, voice recognition etc. and AI is crushing all of their work. "Your neural network doesn't tell you what features make songs distinct, it's not a quantitative model at all" - it doesn't matter at all if our objective is dete…

>Some of the most brilliant people in the world have been working on image recognition, voice recognition etc. and AI is crushing all of their work. This is very true. I take my stronger statements back, MAINSTREAM mathematicians attempting this problem are all wrong, and have been wrong for 50 years. But you do need the right theory, and the right math that realizes this theory. "AI" is superficially beating the wor…

Ok so who are the real, non-mainstream mathematicians who would do better?

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

#177

Post by imtringued » Fri, Apr 19, 2019, 7:15 PM UTC

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…

What if I don't care about general intelligence? Honestly it sounds more like a burden than a benefit. A local maxima might actually be exactly the type of solution that I need, especially in cases where no satisfying solution currently exists.

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

#178

Post by bawana » Fri, Apr 19, 2019, 11:07 PM UTC

And now Google is pushing DeepMind Healthcare in England?! Do they not learn from these examples? Anyone who uses EMR knows very well the beauty of copy-paste and this single little convenience is creating more disinformation than the Mt Everest piles of illegible scrawl that used to be medical records. At least in those days, a HUMAN had to write something. And how did everybody forget this little gem from the 1960s: 'GIGO' = garbage in , garbage out. I dont care how many layers your RNN has, it will NEVER get accurate data. Sick people are not reliable sources of info and it takes a HUMAN to strip off all the emotional distortion to get the facts.