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Layoffs at Watson Health Reveal IBM’s Problem with AI

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Re: Layoffs at Watson Health Reveal IBM’s Problem with AI

#131

Post by xyhopguy »

anonymous5133 wrote: post #93
glup wrote: post #3

"Offering managers didn’t have technical backgrounds and sometimes came up with ideas for new products that were simply impossible." Sounds like they drank their own kool-aid, e.g., "Products That Enhance and Amplify Human Expertise," rather than understand the actual limitations and possibilities of ML. And it seems to me that they're still doing it with this nonsense about a human-level "AI" debating stack. The ove…

IMO, this is a bigger issue in the industry. People are hyping up ML/AI to the point where the actual application is either impossible or extremely difficult. Just look at how many people are so fearful of AI/ML taking away jobs and replacing humans. Anyone in the field knows that AI/ML can take away jobs but it is more of the low-end jobs and everything happens gradually rather than immediately. AI/ML is being more…

IMO AI/ML scientists are drastically underestimating the complexity of biology.

Once scientists in biology and healthcare get on board like they are in linguistics and computer vision I'd expect things to pick up.

Re: Layoffs at Watson Health Reveal IBM’s Problem with AI

#132

Post by boxy310 »

fjsolwmv wrote: post #84
LrnByTeach wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

following is a text snippet from the Article . I do not know which part of the following is AI , it is pure "data analysis" writing few SQL queries . This is the Biggest problem of IBM, they bill these kind of things as AI . > A clinic could use the system to search its patient records and find, for example, all the men over age 45 who were overdue for a colonoscopy, and then use an autocall to remind them to schedul…

The point is it's NOT SQL. It's NLP and whatnot to extract value from relatively natural non-fully schematized data.

DOB and date of last checkup are highly schematizable. This specific example is very well-suited to a SQL solution dumping into an autocaller queue.

Maybe this was a terrible example, and the author didn't grasp a good example of legitimately non-schematic data points?

Re: Layoffs at Watson Health Reveal IBM’s Problem with AI

#133

Post by ModernMech »

abhgh wrote: post #104
cirgue wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None of the things you mentioned are even close to AI. They’re applied statistics, and they mostly use techniques we’ve known about for decades but have only now found a use case because computing and storage is cheap enough to make them viable.

This is an interesting comment - where would you draw the line between AI and applied statistics? A lot of AI which happens to be ML (not saying there is non-ML AI, just that a significant chunk of AI being practiced today is ML) also happens to be applied statistics. Or have statistical interpretations. Also, because something has been around for decades does not make it not AI. For ex the cheque OCR mentioned proba…

The line is clear: everything today branded "AI" is just applied statistics. AI is a buzzword. I don't know what the definition of intelligence is, but I have a feeling it doesn't rest anywhere near concepts like function approximation, and that's all even the most sophisticated "AIs" at Google or Facebook or Apple boil down to.

Re: Layoffs at Watson Health Reveal IBM’s Problem with AI

#134

Post by smartician »

ryanmcbride wrote: post #94

I've never interacted directly with IBM, but I remember about 2 years ago, they had a talk at the Akamai Edge conference about how they dealt with bloated cookies. The company I work for has the same problem so I sat in to see what their solution was. The problem they were having is that all the various IBM lines of business added so much garbage onto the client's cookie, that eventually their pages would stop loadin…

We have run into the same issue before. Many third party services like Optimizely for example just stuff all their tracking information into a cookie, serialized as JSON, which you as the site owner don't really have much control over.

The problem is not that they wouldn't be able to parse the cookie, it's that Akamai edge node web server (Nginx or Apache, don't remember) rejects any request with a header that's above a certain size. Your origin server doesn't even get to know that there ever was such a request.

See https://maxchadwick.xyz/blog/http-request-header-size-limits for example.

Re: Layoffs at Watson Health Reveal IBM’s Problem with AI

#136

Post by stefs »

ryanmcbride wrote: post #94

I've never interacted directly with IBM, but I remember about 2 years ago, they had a talk at the Akamai Edge conference about how they dealt with bloated cookies. The company I work for has the same problem so I sat in to see what their solution was. The problem they were having is that all the various IBM lines of business added so much garbage onto the client's cookie, that eventually their pages would stop loadin…

had to deal with ibm once. we were developing an application for a customer and ibm was working on some new service for them. of course the customer insisted we use the new ibm service, even though it solved a problem we didn't have at all. the ibm product was a website to be used by end users, while our application had to pass our end users data through. so, i asked the ibm guys (via the customer) to give me the docs for their json interface, as i don't necessarily want to parse HTML inside the application to exchange data. there was no json interface - html was all they had -, but they got to work implementing one.

what i got was:

    {"elem" : "html", "children": [ ... {"elem" : "form", "attrs" : {"action": "/an_url", "method" : "post"}, children: [{"input" : {"attrs" : {"type" : "submit", "value" : "..."}}}]} ..., ]}
yes, their json interface was the DOM, serialized as json. but it gets better. to submit my data i had to fill in the actual values in their json struct at the appropriate nodes and send it back.

i'm a) pretty sure this "json interface" feature cost the customer more than i make in a year, and b) it probably broke the very instant the customer let a frontend/designer guy change the html code months later.

Re: Layoffs at Watson Health Reveal IBM’s Problem with AI

#137

Post by Aunche »

cirgue wrote: post #46
krona wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's surely part of the problem, but the catalyst is the marketing strategy that is used to brainwash the employees. In essence; sell the experience, not the product. This works well for IBM generally (the products are shit) but especially well for Watson because it's extremely easy to sell AI without getting bogged down in details. You want to identify brain tumors? We'll just teach Watson to do it. Whilst IBM res…

> This works well for IBM generally (the products are shit) but especially well for Watson because it's extremely easy to sell AI without getting bogged down in details. The cynic in me says that every use of the term AI in any capacity is to sell experience and not functionality. When was the last time you used a product billed as 'AI' and thought 'wow, this is a huge game changer'? Siri is cool, but it's ultimately…

> We can pick up a new skill or recognize a new pattern with a high degree of accuracy really effing fast compared to a computer.

Evolution by natural selection is the OG genetic algorithm, and it's been "running" on billions of organisms in parallel for hundreds of millions of years. The intuition that we take for granted such as the abstract concept of a shape is all hard-coded in our brains from trial and error.

Re: Layoffs at Watson Health Reveal IBM’s Problem with AI

#138

Post by paganel »

stefs wrote: post #136
ryanmcbride wrote: post #94

I've never interacted directly with IBM, but I remember about 2 years ago, they had a talk at the Akamai Edge conference about how they dealt with bloated cookies. The company I work for has the same problem so I sat in to see what their solution was. The problem they were having is that all the various IBM lines of business added so much garbage onto the client's cookie, that eventually their pages would stop loadin…

had to deal with ibm once. we were developing an application for a customer and ibm was working on some new service for them. of course the customer insisted we use the new ibm service, even though it solved a problem we didn't have at all. the ibm product was a website to be used by end users, while our application had to pass our end users data through. so, i asked the ibm guys (via the customer) to give me the doc…

> yes, their json interface was the DOM, serialized as json.

This is pure thedailywtf material.

Re: Layoffs at Watson Health Reveal IBM’s Problem with AI

#139

Post by pinewurst »

petra wrote: post #126
kprybol wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being rules based isn't necessarily a bad thing or disingenuous. I develop healthcare AI products (ML/DL researcher) and we actually aim to be able to translate our models into a rules based engine (find a strong signal, interpret/understand model well enough to translate/embed into a rules engine, look for a new signal in our models, rinse + repeat). We end up deploying a mix of rules based and true ML based models…

As someone in the field, what do you think about the idea of a fully automated "doctor"? Are we close to it being technically feasible , leaving aside regulation and interpersonal qualities doctors bring to the table ?

Depends on the definition of "doctor".

The likes of INTERNIST, CADUCEUS, and MYCIN have been around and provably accurate starting in the late 70s through the mid-80s. MYCIN even arguably sparked the 1st AI boom. But there were ethical issues with computer-aided diagnosis that I'm not sure have been solved/overcome.

Perhaps the current startup generation can get past them with Zuckerberg, Kalanick and Holmes as role models. :)

Re: Layoffs at Watson Health Reveal IBM’s Problem with AI

#140

Post by rossdavidh »

detaro wrote: post #111
DoofusOfDeath wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People aren't faulting IBM for tackling hard systems-integration problems. People are faulting IBM for over-promising, under-delivering, using misleading advertising, and internally seeming to have foolish management practices.

given this line > Once IBM has been in this technology game for a little while, I'm sure they'll get the hang of it. I'd assume the parent is being sarcastic

...and perhaps a little too subtle. Or maybe just not funny enough to be apparent.
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