Layoffs at Watson Health Reveal IBM’s Problem with AI

Isn't this just the same problem IBM has had for...well...most of my adult life?

I had a contract gig at IBM Advanced Technology in Boca for about 18 months in early 2001-2002. Talk about missing the boat...

I was brought in to prop up a soon-to-be-failed project for the Japanese government...basically a "Napster for Tokyo" that would allow paid-for-play C2C song sharing for customers of "the Big 5" record companies.

I asked simple questions that no one could answer...why would people pay for content when it was so easily available via other means? you are using DRM how??? really? you need a special player to play the music?

Why would anyone do that?

I stayed for a few simple reasons...the fat consultant check I cashed every Friday. Exposure to some outstanding engineers and coders where I got to learn from true talent. The great strip club on A1A next to my rental in Lauderdale-by-the-Sea.

But reading over this article reminds me that IBM is just too big to get out of its own way, and has been for the longest time.

[edits]

I always thought Watson Health would be like a smaller spin-off product that wasn't influenced too much by IBM. T

Given all the expectation of its product and the importance of ML/AI, it makes sense this was impossible.

It only reveals IBM's problem with AI if you were at any point under the impression that it was something more than marketing for them and watch actual market signals.

The audience that gobbles up their ad campaign during the Masters that touted their "block chain" logistics probably wouldn't even notice that they had layoffs at Watson health.

This sounds like a case where the AI is used in a "marketing" way to make people interested in a product, and then there isn't really much AI involved, and the people developing the AI have a struggle to prove that it's relevant to the business.

I wonder if DeepMind at Google has a similar problem. It is certainly getting a lot of headlines, but there are plenty of other AI groups within Google that do business-relevant things like improve search or ad matching or make Google Home's voice recognition work. I would not be surprised if in the long run DeepMind becomes a group that performed a neat stunt with Go, but kind of fades in practical relevance, like Watson with Jeopardy.

That is my biggest gripe with this as well. We certainly don't want an another AI winter, especially not in health, where I'm hoping (perhaps too optimistically) that it will allow better and cheaper care.