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IBM’s Watson Health is sold off in parts

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

#121
post #9

A friend of mine wanted to show off his Tesla by making it come to the front of the restaurant from where he parked it. Like he hit a button and it was to drive up. It got stuck somehow and was diagonal in the row. He was like “ehh sometimes it doesn’t work.” AI in general is very over stated. When it works it’s great, when it doesn’t (which is often) then you lose all trust in it.

I think that's the wrong conclusion from this story. The conclusion I draw is that some companies (and Tesla in particular) don't appreciate the "last mile" when trying to apply AI breakthroughs to consumer products. "The plane lands safely 99% of the time" is an impressive demonstration and a completely worthless product, but if that's all you have then what can you do other than launch it?

That's NOT a product you should be launching with planes and cars, considering what would be happening the other 1% of the time.

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

#123

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…

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…

so I worked at IBM cloud, and can confirm this. They bought a cloud service, that by itself, and if left alone would been great. Soft(....something...) was the company... then IBM came and changed everything. I remember the SVP / President of ibm cloud showing up... talking 3 hours about how her son is so great and that we should 'follow' his example... after hour 3, man goes and interrupts and asks a question that was "please get to the point of talking about your son".

Few weeks later, massive layoffs, that triggered the warn act. So now I know how IBM works, see first hand meeting, after meeting being totally worthless. I would say stay far away from anything the touch. Just be glad you could move off their platform and not stuck using their platform with their CICD ... else you would be in living hell.

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

#124
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Prediction markets are one of those things that cryptocurrencies are good for.

Why?

Good question. Prediction markets [1] allow people to bet on outcomes and benefit financially if they are correct.

However, many jurisdictions ban them outright claiming that they a form of gambling and challenging the unregulated nature of questions leading to misaligned incentives (“When will that building burn down?”).

Yet despite these issues, the scheme can offer a neutral ground for betting against overhyped technologies or registering dissent against the policies of authoritarian regimes.

Cryptocurrency based prediction markets further protect the participants by masking or hiding their identities.

The combination of these features makes prediction markets an effective way to deliver global-scale censorship-resistant voting to the masses.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prediction_market

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

#125
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Currently they have one of the only if not the only enterprise permissioned blockchain project called fabric and it’s open source. I could see them making a comeback with crypto but not the way we think about it today. Instead, inter-enterprise operations infrastructure.

> one of the only if not the only enterprise "permissioned" blockchain projects Not quite, check out Corda's R3 project - it's already being widely used in enterprise and projects are being built on top of it.

Good to know, thank you.

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

#126

Who could have seen it coming? IBM created a machine that could win at Jeopardy, not a universal expert or problem solver. Say what you want about Google, but they didn't claim to solve any practical problems by creating AlphaZero.

Google is the next IBM.

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

#128

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.

It'd be nice if you edited your post with the correction.

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

#129

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…

I was surprised by some companies too, until I worked outside of tech. The whole rest of the universe needs software too. Most companies are grossly incompetent to develop it themselves. Most are things that SWEs of the type which visit HN would never, ever want to work on. IBM does that adequately well. That's "services." If I need a tool built which will manage workflow at a management consulting firm, a custom too…

Honestly, I’m not sure IBM is a step up from the Indian firms. It’s certainly more expensive (like, ridiculously so) for not much more quality, if any.

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

#130
post #25
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 assume that you're from the US? Those are both people problems. Tech can't solve many people problems, especially something as entrenched as healthcare. Isn't it huge, something like 10% of the US economy?

Yes, due to massively inflated prices.
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