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IBM Watson Overpromised and Underdelivered on AI Health Care

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Re: IBM Watson Overpromised and Underdelivered on AI Health Care

#111

Post by fybe »

During my time in IBM I was walking by the "main" Watson server everyday into work. I was always impressed at the package, and what ever they said it could do.

Finally got my hands on it and was incredibly disappointed. Lacking features, archaic interface, and not delivering on what it was promised. Talked to some guys working for the Watson team and they told me that half of the AI stuff is just them doing it manually under the guise of "integration and configuration".

I did have fun "talking" to Watson whenever I was bored at work, trying to make him swear

Re: IBM Watson Overpromised and Underdelivered on AI Health Care

#112

Post by DebtDeflation »

1e-9 wrote: post #21

To me, the main mistake was the series of commercials giving the strong impression that IBM already had this incredible Artificial General Intelligence that was indistinguishable from a highly intelligent human and was solving a myriad of difficult practical problems better than any expert. I suspect that most who were well-versed in AI felt the ads were disingenuous from the start. I know I did. I think the marketin…

>To me, the main mistake was the series of commercials giving the strong impression that IBM already had this incredible Artificial General Intelligence

100% correct. Had IBM marketed Watson for what it actually is - an enterprise version of Amazon Alexa or Google Assistant (which admittedly didn't even exist at the time) - they'd be in a completely different spot. Instead we got the Bob Dylan commercials (which under the covers was just speech to text, a hardcoded dialog tree, and text to speech) and all the "Watson is curing cancer" nonsense (which under the covers was just a rules engine sitting on top of a search engine intended to provide customized treatment plans). The actual technology works, but it's an NLP platform for building chatbots and search engines (think intent classifier, relevancy ranker, named entity/semantic relationship/sentiment annotators) not the AGI that it was marketed as.

Re: IBM Watson Overpromised and Underdelivered on AI Health Care

#113

Post by treis »

tosser1234 wrote: post #97
nickpsecurity wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quora has a nice set of answers about why machine learning isn't used so much in medical: https://www.quora.com/Why-isn%E2%80%99t-machine-learning-mor... Skip to Jae Won Joe's answer to see a case study with a patient showing the interactive process. Then, especially look at ending questions about missing or deceptive data. Seems like their good diagnoses comes from a combination of domain data and expertly reading p…

This is a great run-down of the realizations that a lot of the engineering team came to and what I was trying to touch on in my reply above. There is just so much information & context within a doctor's head and so much that is going on during an examination that looks simple to our eyes. Even in the idealized case of having accurate, structured patient data and focusing only on a simple disease, it's a challenge to…

I think this article addresses the half the medical landscape where the problems are hard and computers are worse than humans at solving them. The other half is where the problems are "easy". Practices where Doctors spend ~5 minutes with each patient doing physicals and treating minor ailments. In that half doctors can already easily handle the problems so there's no real value add for a computer.

It would take a paradigm shift before AI became useful. Going to watson.com and getting a prescription for antibiotics would be useful and technically feasible. So would augmenting lower trained people to be able to deliver more care. Neither are possible legally and it's not exactly a field you can get away with disregarding the law.

Re: IBM Watson Overpromised and Underdelivered on AI Health Care

#114

Post by Bjartr »

scrooched_moose wrote: post #54
Waterluvian wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my opinion you don't even need to be an expert. - if you're a generally competent, learned person - and the new product feels like a giant leap from anything that exists already - it's likely not all it claims to be.

I've always had a 20% threshold If anyone is promising a 20% or greater improvement over the current leaders, I immediately file it away as a scam until I see extraordinary proof. Other than some very immature industries, even 20% leaps don't happen without earth shattering once-in-a-generation breakthroughs. Some call me a pessimist, and occasionally I'm unfairly dismissive of new technologies. But for every one I g…

I feel like people are interpreting your "20%" criteria more literally than you intended.

Re: IBM Watson Overpromised and Underdelivered on AI Health Care

#115

Post by Retra »

seibelj wrote: post #96
nickpsecurity wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Federal Reserve is worth maybe every dollar on the planet. It's survived almost a hundred years. It bankrolled Bitcoin with it and most cryptocurrencies depending on dollars for investments, paying employees, etc. From centralized banking to sustaining decentralized platforms, the Federal Reserve is successful beyond anyone's wildest dreams in the 1910's. Except maybe the people that created it. See why your argu…

I made no comment on Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies replacing the Federal Reserve. I am arguing that Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are, 1) Not worthless, 2) Not a scam, 3) Have interesting technical properties that are worthy of study and improvement, 4) Have real-world utility, and 5) Should not be immediately dismissed by HN groupthink.

And blockchain peddlers can certainly over-promise/under-deliver without contradicting any of those points.

Re: IBM Watson Overpromised and Underdelivered on AI Health Care

#116

Post by seibelj »

Retra wrote: post #115
seibelj wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I made no comment on Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies replacing the Federal Reserve. I am arguing that Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are, 1) Not worthless, 2) Not a scam, 3) Have interesting technical properties that are worthy of study and improvement, 4) Have real-world utility, and 5) Should not be immediately dismissed by HN groupthink.

And blockchain peddlers can certainly over-promise/under-deliver without contradicting any of those points.

And VC funded startups in Silicon Valley over-promise/under-deliver to their investors and employees. Welcome to tech startups

Re: IBM Watson Overpromised and Underdelivered on AI Health Care

#117

Post by ethbro »

djakjxnanjak wrote: post #85
ethbro wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I call this the Netflix ML effect. If your answer is mission critical, probabilistic ML isn't advanced, explainable, or reliable enough for your problem. If your answer is of the great-to-be-right, meh-to-be-wrong sort (e.g. ranking movie recommendations), then you can and should go nuts with ML. And if someone really wants to do an ML project on the former, do everything you can to transform it into the latter.

If you can tune the specifics-sensitivity curve, you should be able to handle both cases. You have to be willing to refuse to provide an answer when you have low confidence.

Absolutely. Which I'd classify as a great way to punt.

But some projects as presented don't have a clear refusal option.

ML would go a long way if the Hippocratic Oath (or derivative thereof) were taken & adhered to by the industry.

Re: IBM Watson Overpromised and Underdelivered on AI Health Care

#118

Post by freehunter »

seibelj wrote: post #60
freehunter wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People kept investing with Bernie Madoff for decades too, because his investments kept giving returns. People will keep shoveling money into Bitcoin as long as its value keeps swinging wildly. That's hardly a measure of success.

How much will Bitcoin have to be worth, and for how long, to make it successful in your eyes? Or is the entire idea of a digital asset with intrinsic value impossible to you?

It's not about how much Bitcoin is worth when translated to another currency. It's about how much Bitcoin is worth on its own.

How much is Bitcoin worth without translating it to another currency? Schrute Bucks and Stanley Nickels.

Re: IBM Watson Overpromised and Underdelivered on AI Health Care

#119

Post by chaoticmass »

barbecue_sauce wrote: post #89
zeropnc wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s called Bluemix - it’s hilarously underwhelming

The greatest thing about BlueMix was its promotional budget. Saw The Force Awakens on IBM's dime, and got about $50 worth of movie theater gift cards. All I had to do was sit through a 20 minute presentation about BlueMix case study integrations.

I saw Force Awakens via IBM as well, and I got a cool light saber toy!

https://twitter.com/chaoticmass/status/677708888083439616

I did look at the BlueMix platform, and it seemed like a big mix of various APIs I could tap into. Some of them looked neat, but I never had a reason to really use any of them.

Re: IBM Watson Overpromised and Underdelivered on AI Health Care

#120

Post by chaoticmass »

seibelj wrote: post #60
freehunter wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People kept investing with Bernie Madoff for decades too, because his investments kept giving returns. People will keep shoveling money into Bitcoin as long as its value keeps swinging wildly. That's hardly a measure of success.

How much will Bitcoin have to be worth, and for how long, to make it successful in your eyes? Or is the entire idea of a digital asset with intrinsic value impossible to you?

The thing I think is odd about Bitcoin and it's future is how energy intensive it is to run the network. It is known that bitcoin miners use huge amounts of electricity, which costs money, but you can't yet pay your electric bill with bitcoin, nor can you pay taxes in bitcoin. Just seems a bit unsustainable to me.
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