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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

#261

Post by telxosser »

colinmhayes wrote: post #221
vasili111 wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Of course AI could replace doctors. Some people will always prefer the bedside manner a person provides, but many others won't care, and AI will eventually do a good job at imitating a good doctor's bedside manner.

Machine learning could beat my doctor right now. "Using Random Forest Algorithm for Breast Cancer Diagnosis" https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8644835

Most of what the doctor is doing is a type of modern shamanism though. Person doesn't feel good, so the doctor orders a useless test, test comes back negative so the person feels better. Then we complain health care cost too much.

10 full blood panel samples a year with other bio-metric data and a data set of 20 million people to do classification on would crush the doctor over time.

This bullshit health system though makes it impossible to have any real innovation at a mass scale. We will never have personal higher frequency medical data in my lifetime that would actually hugely improve the system and cut most of the cost out.

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

#262

Post by Spooky23 »

KerrAvon wrote: post #161
chromatin wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It also helps to have a relationship with a patient (or person). There are some people who will never, ever complain about anything. When they complain of severe abdominal pain, for example, you pull out all the stops immediately to figure out what's wrong, because it's probably really bad. On the other hand, there are hypochondriacs and people will low pain tolerance. While they can certainly also become seriously i…

Sometimes a relationship is bad. If you think someone’s a hypochondriac, but in fact they’re unusually sensitive, you’ll dismiss a lot of what they say and that can be quite damaging over time. (Especially if they’re female https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/women-and-pain-dispariti... ). I wouldn’t eliminate GPs from the process, but many people actually would like to hear what the robots have to say about their me…

Lol. Maybe people who don’t have any medical problems.

There isn’t enough humanity in healthcare to begin with. Replacement of doctors with AI sounds pretty horrific. General practice isn’t where healthcare costs are going bonkers, and it seems weird to want to cost-cut something that actually kind of works in favor of bullshit.

Know what would be a great use of AI? Something real like analyzing all of the telemetry in EMRs to provide better guidance to doctors to proactively guide people. Some CVSHealth chatbot telling me whatever is a waste of time.

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

#263

Post by spookthesunset »

ProAm wrote: post #126
civilized wrote: post #2

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.

I don’t know. Does google do consulting?

IBM is its own category of tech company really… Oracle would fit the bill better.

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

#264

Post by scrubs »

treis wrote: post #218
Aeolun wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

IBM is basically an Indian firm these days

Is it? Really? No. In fact it's not. Name one Indian company that ever reached 1/10th of what ibm had so that it's a candidate for seeing it on the way down.

A serious insult because it'd be much more true would be to look at it's OD, culture and demise since Gerstner. Gerstner wasn't happy with a lot of IBM slop, paper pushers, and corporate BS either. That'd keep it on track rather than spurious comparisons.

Gerstner layed of somewhere around 20% of work force, sold off tons of ibm art, real estate etc because IBM was lost ... And losing money. That says something. Spurious comparisons don't.

Labeling IBM bad because it out sources to India is a vieled insult to indians and it's culture I guess. If that's the position -- not mine --- have the galiteantry and courage to just say so.

I'm reminded of the Futurama line: do you idiots where you're from? Nobody nowhere can say no to that. American culture, OD, and common sense when it's not losing money, playing golf, splashing around shareholder cash on art or tieing up innovation in BS (all of which IBM did pre Gerstner and was called out for) expects problems fixed, brings out the best in all comers, and expects comers to be value add. Thosr that cant play that game are out.

Regrettably this has one dark corner. Management isnt so good at overseeing itself. So in really bad situations they are good at shifting blame. Well nobody said it'd be easy. Let's start by not gossiping however.

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

#266

Post by spookthesunset »

shane_b wrote: post #39
boboche wrote: post #17

IBM is such a shadow of what it used to be. Hopefully newer health+genomic+ai startups or initiatives at less dinosauresques companies will make the next leap happen in our lifetime.

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.

The problem with “blockchain” is it is a textbook example of a solution in search of a problem.

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

#267

Post by AlexandrB »

shane_b wrote: post #39
boboche wrote: post #17

IBM is such a shadow of what it used to be. Hopefully newer health+genomic+ai startups or initiatives at less dinosauresques companies will make the next leap happen in our lifetime.

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.

What is the use case for this technology? If it's permissioned, it might as well be a normal database with the "append-only" setting enabled.

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

#268

Post by cgearhart »

sixdimensional wrote: post #108
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.

I personally feel Watson was an extremely clever marketing boondoggle. If you think of it, machine learning, neural networks and AI were just making a return into the public mind around the time they announced Watson. I think somebody thought if they "humanized" AI by making it seem like it was a character, it would make AI seem all that much more closer to the dream. On the face of it, not a horrible idea, but appli…

Worth noting that Jeopardy Watson had very little ML and absolutely no deep learning (it was a few years pre-AlexNet). I don’t even think it used any neural networks; certainly not in any major way because they’re not a major topic anywhere in the press releases, working group notes, or the papers published by the Watson research group. Watson was an incredibly complex mixture of bespoke implementations of “classical” AI and NLP techniques to handle questions of different classes by transforming them into search & information retrieval problems. They were able to make it work pretty well for the very limited domain of questions that arise in Jeopardy, but it was also obviously a Herculean task to generalize that approach. I can totally believe that as executives started to grok what Watson really was they realized that it had more value as a brand than as a technology.

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

#269

Post by tsywke44 »

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…

The tech sector prints money. Large companies can leech off past heroics built by former employees for decades, even if the current employees are incompetent. A zombie company if you will.

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

#270

Post by Karunamon »

ThinkBeat wrote: post #198
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…

They make awesome mainframes. Extremely reliable, and extremely good at what they do. They sure are expensive. A lot more companies should adopt them. Yet its going the way. They run at scale at a lot of companies. AS/400 / iSeries was awesome at least in the beginning. I think it may be discontinued now. Those machines were extremely reliable and well made. Often companies who had bought one had no idea where it was…

I wish there was a way to learn mainframes that were accessible to mere mortals. Some toying around with a (almost certainly illicit) emulated copy of z/OS revealed an extremely complex, no doubt powerful, but entirely alien system that I'd have loved to get my head around, but alas, I could find no good resources.
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