Layoffs at Watson Health Reveal IBM’s Problem with AI

Post by dirkgently » Tue, Jun 26, 2018, 4:08 AM UTC

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…

Post by scoggs » Tue, Jun 26, 2018, 4:11 AM UTC

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…

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Jun 26, 2018, 4:29 AM UTC

manigandham wrote: post #165

ryandrake wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did the change request come complete with specific requirements on what the interface should include? Because it sounds like they produced exactly what was asked for: a JSON interface. If the requirements were poorly specified, you can’t lay all the blame on them.

Yes you can. There's a basic level of competence in dealing with context around a request. Any decent developer or PM would know what a JSON API is supposed to be.

Post by parasubvert » Tue, Jun 26, 2018, 4:42 AM UTC

aiisjustanif wrote: post #109

coderdude wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those two departments couldn't possibly be related. It seems unfair to base judgement on the entire company for that.

So we have some more info out there: - Their PCF solution is deprecated - They were still using a deprecated container management solution instead of kubernetes until recently - If you use Java the for you to use liberty build packs - They push XP and TDD practices from the garage yet many of their consultants don't practice what they preach.

Post by abiox » Tue, Jun 26, 2018, 4:56 AM UTC

cirgue wrote: post #88

nostrademons wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use & depend upon plenty of products that are built upon AI - GMail spam filtering & categorized inbox, Google image search, YouTube & Netflix recommendations, cheque OCR at my ATM, predictive keyboards on my phone, Amazon's "people also buy with this product" feature, Google translate, computer opponents in games that I play, and all of the signals that feed into Google Search. The irony is that not one of these b…

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.