Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

IBM halting sales of Watson AI tool for drug discovery

statnews.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 178 posts

Re: IBM halting sales of Watson AI tool for drug discovery

#151

Post by jammygit »

PedroBatista wrote: post #23
wpasc wrote: post #19

I sincerely hope IBM's failures do not deter further progress in trying to innovate in healthcare technology. I believe healthcare vitally needs GOOD/USEFUL technology and AI applications because medical progress is not advancing quickly enough by several metrics. I hope IBM continues to fail and becomes a case study in the failure of massive bureaucracy.

IBM will not fail, Oracle will fail first than IBM and that's unlikely to happen. You see, they are NOT tech companies. They have something you would call "tech", they sell something that looks like "tech" but they really solve problems people with access to large amounts of money have. In other words, they produce cushy and warm beds for C-level execs to have a good night of sleep, and everyone needs some bed to sle…

In the startup world there is a lot of customer obsession. What is it about these big companies that let's them de-prioritize that and still thrive? Honest question.

Re: IBM halting sales of Watson AI tool for drug discovery

#152

Post by skwb »

ousta wrote: post #143
skwb wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All the preclinical work is actually the cheap part of pharmaceutical development. Most of the costs come from the clinical trials for the FDA. Now a lot of the reason for this is that the US spends a pretty penny (and a lot of elbow grease from grad students) on basic biomedical research that's published into journals for "free" from the perspective of the pharmaceutical corporation. That said, if you can make clini…

it is a half baked truth. pharma want you to believe trials are expensive so they inflate crazily their costs to price their drugs high. but at the end when u try to sell them software they dont look at the inflates costs of trials be sure of that

Costs don't drive prices. Demand does. I'll be the first to admit that pharmaceutical economics is not simple (lots of externalities, asymmetry of information, etc.), but in the long run costs do matter, and so does price. Best example is Solvaldi, which initially sold for ~$100,000 per treatment. It's much much down (~$65,000) once Merk came online with their hep C competitor. Prices do matter, and while the market is easily distorted, it's not immune to the laws of economics.

Re: IBM halting sales of Watson AI tool for drug discovery

#153

Post by shshhdhs »

pjmorris wrote: post #128
bamboozled wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a common pattern everywhere unfortunately. Snake oil salesmen and their victims. I have daily skirmishes at my company with our CTO and his subordinates who constantly want to believe snake oil salesmen because they’re looking for simple ways outs of hard problems. It’s really sad. For some it seems easier to -_trust_ a dude with a power point presentation and no real experience over good engineers telling th…

> I now think it’s madness for anyone to be in charge of anything if they don’t have relevant experience in the relevant domain. This. In support of that idea, here's C.A.R. Hoare, from 'The Emperor's Old Clothes', the 1980 Turing Award lecture: 'At last, there breezed into my office the most senior manager of all, a general manager of our parent company, Andrew St. Johnston. I was surprised that he had even heard of…

What was the solution here? To learn the Elliott 503 Mark II more deeply?

Re: IBM halting sales of Watson AI tool for drug discovery

#154

Post by skwb »

wpasc wrote: post #142
skwb wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there has to be tougher scrutiny for the tech we apply to healthcare. Us in the healthcare technology community have to have the guts to stand up and call out companies like theranos. If we don't, investors will come away thinking that healthcare is overly complicated and won't invest, and healthcare stakeholders will come to the conclusion that we don't actually care about their business practice or more imp…

How about easier barriers to entry with tougher reporting requirements? I personally fear the FDA is too optimized for bad headline avoidance to the detriment of allowing more experimental leeway. Not saying it should be the Wild West, just suggesting that perhaps the risk tolerance is currently too low. What if it were easier to perform more experiments, but if you hid/covered up any bad data there would be hell to…

I think the current system is working now, it just needs enforcement. 510(k) applications (where you need a preexisting requisite on class 2, or low/moderate risk device) certainly seem to be doing their job. Lots of healthcare startups (including those using AI algorithms) have used that path to successfully submit to the FDA for clearance.

That said, there's a lot of bunk science marketed to consumers within healthcare. Your average consumer heats microbiome and genomics and AI and thinks that the product will cure them of disease. I don't think it's the role for the FDA (until they make specific health claims), but we need to remind consumers to be smart purchases of these services. And for us in the healthcare tech space need to be careful who we want to include within our communities to ensure we share the values of positive patient.

Re: IBM halting sales of Watson AI tool for drug discovery

#155

Post by spaced-out »

acdc4life wrote: post #132
bduerst wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It uses both - the neural network creates it's own acoustic fingerprint database, which it then uses to perceive sound. This shrinks the traditional acoustic fingerprinting data enough to be stored on mobile devices, while allowing for a low-power "always-on" identification offline. It's analogous to a human being able to identify songs by remembering the chorus, just that the NN uses it's own features for both the m…

The biggest issue I have is: "To do this we developed an entirely new system using convolutional neural networks to turn a few seconds of audio into a unique “fingerprint.” Why did you pick a neural network? What mathematical properties does a neural network have that makes it appealing to this problem? How were the networks trained? Back propagation? It doesn't converge, and worse learning weights for a new batch ca…

You'll never be able to develop features with the heuristic methods you described that will work as well as the features learned by a neural net.

Re: IBM halting sales of Watson AI tool for drug discovery

#156

Post by randcraw »

tabtab wrote: post #62
arkitaip wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I doubt that's how Watson is being marketed to customers, though. IBM tends to oversell and under deliver and have grown increasingly desperate with their shrinking market shares in both hardware and services.

You can only live on spin for so long.

Unless you work as a consultant. Or in Washington.

Re: IBM halting sales of Watson AI tool for drug discovery

#157

Post by m463 »

erikpukinskis wrote: post #123
m463 wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know, it would be very profitable for someone to profess an expertise in X, reach out to various companies to help them use X to solve their problems, then simultaneously gain experience in X while patenting the heck out of any problems solved with X.

You’re describing a person who has a huge amount of expertise in sales. But a person like that can very lucratively sell actual products that already exist, so why would they want to sell this mysterious X?

but products that actually exist are X-1 not X

Re: IBM halting sales of Watson AI tool for drug discovery

#158

Post by randcraw »

acdc4life wrote: post #132
bduerst wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It uses both - the neural network creates it's own acoustic fingerprint database, which it then uses to perceive sound. This shrinks the traditional acoustic fingerprinting data enough to be stored on mobile devices, while allowing for a low-power "always-on" identification offline. It's analogous to a human being able to identify songs by remembering the chorus, just that the NN uses it's own features for both the m…

The biggest issue I have is: "To do this we developed an entirely new system using convolutional neural networks to turn a few seconds of audio into a unique “fingerprint.” Why did you pick a neural network? What mathematical properties does a neural network have that makes it appealing to this problem? How were the networks trained? Back propagation? It doesn't converge, and worse learning weights for a new batch ca…

I agree with spaced-out. A neural net can capture all those smaller eigenvectors in the signal that are routinely thrown away during traditional feature engineering, like what you describe. When the number of training samples grows big enough, those factors with marginal contribution become significant and allow higher levels of accuracy in prediction or classification than are possible when curating features manually.

Deep nets are here to stay. They're just not magic bullets that solve all problems equally well, especially those when training data is minimal.

Re: IBM halting sales of Watson AI tool for drug discovery

#159

Post by pjc50 »

m463 wrote: post #111
distant_hat wrote: post #75

Slightly over a year back, we were contacted by IBM to try out Watson under some program for startups. Starting out, they asked us to give them a try. We gave them a NLP related task and they were confident they would be able to do a good job of it. After multiple meetings over the next 2 months, they barely produced any useful output. In the meantime, an intern with us got a pretty decent solution using just Python.…

You know, it would be very profitable for someone to profess an expertise in X, reach out to various companies to help them use X to solve their problems, then simultaneously gain experience in X while patenting the heck out of any problems solved with X.

This is exactly what IBM and Oracle etc have been doing for years.

Re: IBM halting sales of Watson AI tool for drug discovery

#160

Post by distant_hat »

c0mpute wrote: post #78
distant_hat wrote: post #75

Slightly over a year back, we were contacted by IBM to try out Watson under some program for startups. Starting out, they asked us to give them a try. We gave them a NLP related task and they were confident they would be able to do a good job of it. After multiple meetings over the next 2 months, they barely produced any useful output. In the meantime, an intern with us got a pretty decent solution using just Python.…

What do you think of your CEO now :)?

Well, he was pretty good, he let us take the decisions completely so we never paid anything for it other than in time. Moreover, we weren't flush with cash or anything so they wouldn't have made much anyway.
Post reply on HN