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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

#151

Post by listenallyall »

Brybry wrote: post #38
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…

The American medical system is truly bizarre. I've been to private practices where every day at lunch or near end of day there would be some drug rep with food for all the staff. And a psychiatrist that had stacks of free samples of drugs. Even contact lenses are marketed with free samples.

Everyone talks about the relationship between drug reps and doctors like it's the most incestuous, evil, corrupt thing. How else are doctors, especially those who are 10, 20 years removed from their residency, supposed to learn about new treatments and medicines? Alexa, what is best current treatment for a duodenal ulcer? You think a doctor is going to spend his limited downtime perusing the PDR (which no longer exists, and was always heavily influenced by the drug manufacturers anyway)?

Sure, there may be some excesses (although the truly major perks like entire vacations dressed up as a "conference" no longer exist), but I would much rather have doctors be aware of new drugs and yes, subject to marketing pitches, than have these drugs languish (eventually leading to drugs not being created) because nobody knows about them.

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

#152

Post by ta988 »

gexla wrote: post #52
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.

So, they invented a Mechanical Turk?

One that lost games yes.

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

#153

Post by twexler »

JediPig wrote: post #123
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…

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 w…

Softlayer is the name you're thinking of. They were pretty decent 10 or so years ago, but never touched them after the IBM acquisition.

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

#155

Post by Aeolun »

vasili111 wrote: post #102
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…

AI cannot replace doctors. It can help doctors a lot but not replace.

That just means we need a general artificial intelligence to do it. We don’t have those now, but I wouldn’t say never.

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

#156

Post by rvense »

newsbinator wrote: post #117
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…

> 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.

Yes, it's almost perfectly dual: the things we do easily, without thinking, are hard for machines. Many things that we can only do with years of training, machines do effortlessly.

I think technology like Watson has a bright future when applied in the right way, but I think it's counter-productive to wrap it in anthropomorphic marketing, and especially to give it these direct natural language interfaces. Because that makes people misunderstand what it is.

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

#157

Post by agumonkey »

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…

IBM is old, it's good and bad (probably not the first time they made bad decisions). Let's see if they can wash off the last decade or two that were full of mistakes.

They still do stuff but it's hard research and niche so business wise it won't make them short term success. You mention power but they also have a good hand in Quantum Computing.

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

#158

Post by shakna »

Bombthecat wrote: post #118
robk wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That seems negligent enough for your company to sue them

Good luck suing ibm..

For breach of contract and negligence, IBM were successfully sued, and then banned from all future projects, by the Queensland government in 2013. [0] Which sets you up with a nice precedent and set of documents to see their angle of attack.

> IBM will not be allowed to enter any new contracts with the State Government until it improves its governance and contracting practices.

With that ban _still live today_, it astonishes me that any corporation would trust the organisation to actually carry through with their obligations. You have to really, really, royally screw up for a government body to consider you anathema.

The old adage of "No one was ever fired for hiring IBM" is no longer true or reasonable.

[0] https://statements.qld.gov.au/statements/72961

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

#159

Post by HumanReadable »

deelowe wrote: post #119
absoluteharam wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Worked for IBM for three years, this is accurate. To solve some clients problem we would build an ML solution from scratch just like everyone else, and then try to shoehorn some Watson service into it so we could use the Watson Brand to distinguish our product.

The solutions we built were generally pretty good and our clients were happy, but the Watson part was never anything more than marketing,

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

#160

Post by HiJon89 »

mnd999 wrote: post #81
cube00 wrote: post #26

It will be interesting to see if self driving cars and the way they've been rushed to market with the same brute force marketing will meet a similar fate.

Self driving cars are just that, marketing. Tesla for all their hype have limited driver assist only and even Google who seem to have the most advanced offering only works in limited areas in good conditions and the dataset that drives it requires lots of maintenance. The general problem is too hard, and general practice has some of the same problems. Probably less adversarial data, but there’s still litigation to be…

Limited driver assist? Are all the videos of people using Tesla full self-driving on YouTube fake?
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