IBM’s Watson Health is sold off in parts • Hacker News Board

Re: IBM’s Watson Health is sold off in parts

#111

Post by lvl100 » Sun, Jan 23, 2022, 4:04 PM UTC

perardi wrote: post #103

I worked for one of the companies that IBM acquired to make this non-product. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-merge-healthcare-m-a-ibm/... I have no idea what they got for the money they spent. Merge Healthcare was the most miserable work experience I have ever had. They had patents, I guess, but the actual technology was garbage. And the owner was…a piece of work, let's say that. https://www.npr.org/2018/12/12/67…

Healthcare IT is all garbage. It’s as if the people who invested in the space specifically did not want any of the inefficiencies to go away.

Re: IBM’s Watson Health is sold off in parts

#112

Post by [deleted] » Sun, Jan 23, 2022, 4:04 PM UTC

rvense wrote: post #11

The technology they sent on Jeopard answered a question, I think, that was looking for the name of a specific king of Egypt with "What are trousers?". Seems pretty obvious that anything that would do that is not human-like intelligence, and probably the search results should be taken with a handful of salt even if they stuck some impressive natural language generation after it.

[deleted]

Re: IBM’s Watson Health is sold off in parts

#113

Post by bpiche » Sun, Jan 23, 2022, 4:04 PM UTC

kumarvvr wrote: post #37

History will see our current decade of AI and only see over promises and under deliveries. I have decent amount of hope for AI, but corporate greed, hype by practitioners, a general explosion of various edTech companies hyping up the hype to drive online course sales and general excess of VC money is driving an embarrassing amount of AI failures. I am sure that any fad now and in the future, will have a similar cycle…

Nothing to be afraid of

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_winter

Re: IBM’s Watson Health is sold off in parts

#114

Post by mathattack » Sun, Jan 23, 2022, 4:04 PM UTC

nickysielicki wrote: post #48

I do not understand how IBM stays in business. As far as I’m concerned the only cool engineering thing IBM does anymore is POWER, which has a sort of unique memory architecture but otherwise is well behind everyone else. What else did they do in my lifetime? They took a profitable RedHat and gutted it, they took the best Laptop line and sold it to Lenovo and almost ruined it, they tried to be a front runner in ML but…

They are in the audit business. Large companies have pockets where outsourced engineering teams have installed or forgotten to delete their outmoded software. They send in an audit team, and come up with a massive payment due. Then they negotiate with their “customers” to have them buy new software for approximately half the cost of audit payment. IBM gets new revenue (and new products to audit) and companies pat themselves on the back for averting disaster. And the new software never gets used.

Re: IBM’s Watson Health is sold off in parts

#115

Post by pfraze » Sun, Jan 23, 2022, 4:04 PM UTC

nickysielicki wrote: post #91

colonwqbang wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have a link to the commercial?

Yikes, I misremembered, it’s a Hewlett-Packard commercial. https://youtu.be/0EL3ZkcMNS4 This commercial still makes me laugh. The way she finishes his sentence with “our digital transformation” is the kicker.

That line really is the kicker. I compulsively muttered “god damnit” when I heard it.

Re: IBM’s Watson Health is sold off in parts

#116

Post by CodeGlitch » Sun, Jan 23, 2022, 4:04 PM UTC

ricardobayes wrote: post #59

saxonww wrote: post #14

I really expected that we'd see a change in my lifetime, that GPs in particular would be replaced by a lower-cost Watson descendant, with there being some other role for patient interaction, wet work, and data entry (perhaps just nurses). My mom worked for a GP for about 20 years, and it seemed to me that most of what made that guy a doctor was bedside manner + being able to remember a lot of things. But GPs often ma…

I thought the same, but as I grow older, I believe people would reject this. Even a subpar human GP would be much more accepted than a computer. That's not necessarily true in some societies though, e.g. Japan probably would accept it. That said, I would probably focus on fixing the system first in a way that a significant percent of population doesn't need to order fish medicine off amazon to get treatment.

I wouldn't mind seeing a computer first before a GP. A lot of the time a GP will say something like "here try these tablets and come back in a week". The true worth of a GP is the follow-up appointments and understanding conditions over time.

Re: IBM’s Watson Health is sold off in parts

#117

Post by newsbinator » Sun, Jan 23, 2022, 4:05 PM UTC

rvense wrote: post #11

The technology they sent on Jeopard answered a question, I think, that was looking for the name of a specific king of Egypt with "What are trousers?". Seems pretty obvious that anything that would do that is not human-like intelligence, and probably the search results should be taken with a handful of salt even if they stuck some impressive natural language generation after it.

I'm okay with this: humans likely make hilariously bad guesses about things that are obvious and easily accessible to machines, and therefore the reverse is also true.

Guessing "what are trousers" for king of Egypt isn't in itself an indicator the whole Watson system is flawed. Although you're right: it's an indicator the intelligence is non human-like.

Just like, from Watson's perspective, a human named John making hilariously bad guesses related to coin flips isn't in itself an indicator that John isn't intelligent either.

Just that there are some categories of knowledge or application of that knowledge that some systems are bad at handling.

Re: IBM’s Watson Health is sold off in parts

#118

Post by Bombthecat » Sun, Jan 23, 2022, 4:05 PM UTC

robk wrote: post #100

jiscariot wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work in a role where half of our stuff is in IBM's cloud (for decisions made before my tenure). On a day in Mid-November, we started receiving alerts from our UAT and PROD environments. Logged in, all our stuff was gone. Opened a ticket and did some digging and found in our audit logs an IBM SRE had deleted all our stuff. They then told us there was no way to recover and we'd have to rebuild from scratch. They had…

That seems negligent enough for your company to sue them

Good luck suing ibm..

Re: IBM’s Watson Health is sold off in parts

#119

Post by deelowe » Sun, Jan 23, 2022, 4:08 PM UTC

absoluteharam wrote: post #56

user3939382 wrote: post #7

I could be mistaken because it’s been a while, but I read that Watson’s diagnostic capabilities turned out to be mostly marketing and that eventually IBM ended up hiring teams of doctors to process the diagnosis requests that were coming into Watson.

Watson became a marketing term after the company spent hundreds of millions to brand Watson to be synonymous with AI. The term Watson then got appended to existing businesses as it allowed them all to benefit from the brand equity and Watson ads. This unfortunately happened even if there wasn’t any AI capabilities, so it eventually backfired. Watson Health seems to have been focused on selling the narrative of AI in…

As someone with no inside knowledge, it seemed to me that watson started as a technology (or maybe solution/set of solutions) and as time went on, it was pivoted to be a brand? Hard to tell for sure with how difficult it is to get IBM to answer questions about what they actually do...

Re: IBM’s Watson Health is sold off in parts

#120

Post by anm89 » Sun, Jan 23, 2022, 4:09 PM UTC

I don't know if I'm the only one, but I always felt like Watson was roleplaying being a relevant tech company. Something about the way they marketed it just seemed like it was a big PR campaign with no meat behind it. I always had a suspicion that most people agreed but was never really sure.