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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

#401

Post by nradov »

Elof wrote: post #353
Spooky23 wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think the person was suggesting using the results of the AI to inform the doctors, not replacing them. Which is something I would like as well

Automated diagnosis applications have existed for decades. They have proven useful in limited circumstances for certain specialties and rare conditions but for routine medical care they're more hassle than they're worth.

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

#402

Post by belter »

Damogran6 wrote: post #339
aunty_helen wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve sat in an all hands like that before. Literally 50k$ an hour being wasted listening to some guy we’ll only ever see once talk about his sons 18th birthday. Weird experience.

Owner of the company spent half the meeting talking about how they take their grandkids anywhere in the world they want to go when they turn 16...I look at the audience paying rapt attention and I'm thinking 'this is a little odd' Then he mentioned the 'merger of equals' and I thought 'this isn't good news' Narrator: It wasn't.

Also been on one of those. One of the employees raised the fact salaries had been on a freeze for the last two years. Answer from VP doing the all-hands meeting: "My wife also wanted me to buy a new boat this year but I could not"

Started looking for a new job that same minute...

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

#403

Post by JCM9 »

Watson was mostly data science powered consulting pretending to have/be a product. They played heavily on the Jeopardy thing from a marking standpoint but what they were actually trying to sell was a hot mess.

I do consider this a good milestone in getting past the latest “AI” hype cycle and focusing on what actually works in that space. Sat through too many meetings with non-technical execs saying “what if we apply Watson here?”. The likes of McKinsey were pushing this stuff hard in what they were whispering into executives ears.

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

#404

Post by PragmaticPulp »

tekstar wrote: post #260

I worked for a large e-commerce company. I wanted to investigate putting all our support data into Watson and see what sort of recommendations it could provide, maybe a sort of auto-suggestion to help our customers. Three really funny points stand out from the experience: 1) To apply for Watson access you needed to show C-level approval, so our CEO put his name and phone number on the application (trying Watson was s…

Everything about this sounds like they hired inexperienced sales people and promised them huge payouts if they could close certain deals. The kinds of sales people who won’t hesitate to burn a lot of customer relationships to the ground as long as they could close a few big deals for themselves.

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

#405

Post by beckingz »

rbobby wrote: post #150
riddleronroof wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because people who make that fatal decision read Gartner magic quadrants.

Hmm... maybe the magic in magic quadrants is in how they attract the sorts of people that will act on the information conveyed by the grid. Way better than an Ouija board for IT recommendations. Ouija is very hit and miss, really depends on what spirit you get connected with. Magic quadrants just work. /lol

They just work if you dont' care about money.

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

#406

Post by PragmaticPulp »

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…

> 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.

That’s exactly right, but there’s nothing wrong with that.

A good doctor’s memory of patients spanning decades of a career and all of the various treatments that they did or did not respond to is very valuable. It’s a good thing that they offload as much as possible to other people so they can focus on doing what they do best.

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

#407

Post by ako »

erosenbe0 wrote: post #234
snarf21 wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Additionally, a GP has med school plus residency. A Stanford CS grad will start higher than most GPs with only a bachelors degree.

Mediocre GP makes 200k cash in Omaha or any average city and has choice among many employers and systems. Stanford CS represents top talent and moreover does not make 200k cash in Omaha, and can only make the big bucks at a fixed number of entities in fixed locations with fixed hierarchies and systems.

A freelance GP (waarnemend huisarts) in the Netherlands makes on average 65 euros per hour... It pays better to be a freelance software engineer. Less education required, less responsibilities, impact of mistakes is also usually less.

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

#408

Post by mrtksn »

tekstar wrote: post #260

I worked for a large e-commerce company. I wanted to investigate putting all our support data into Watson and see what sort of recommendations it could provide, maybe a sort of auto-suggestion to help our customers. Three really funny points stand out from the experience: 1) To apply for Watson access you needed to show C-level approval, so our CEO put his name and phone number on the application (trying Watson was s…

The company I worked for used some Oracle tech and I was trying to get some high level information about a product but their website kept requesting my e-mail just to show me some documentation.

Once I provided them with my e-mail, I started receiving "You must take us to your leader" messages in a tone as if I was their employee and they were commanding me to take them to my CEO. I can't imagine myself chasing the CEO in the building because some sales people in Oracle told me to do so :)

To be fair, after being in meetings with theirs sales engineers(who wore the best shirts I've ever seen) a few times I grew to respect their stubbornness and the way they structured their corporate machine. It's a valuable lesson to have an exposure to corporate dealings I believe, before that I used to do freelance stuff and had no idea how a simple webpage can cost millions and why a large corporation won't buy that easily from a small company with similar or better product at the fraction of the cost.

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

#409

Post by oneoff786 »

akira2501 wrote: post #344
newsbinator wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Humans understand the value of saying "I don't know" then their internally measured probability of accuracy is very low. AIs don't seem to have that "gate," and to a human, it does make them appear to be very 'foolish' machines.

AI do have measures of confidence. It’s just most use cases have them throw out a guess anyway.

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

#410

Post by tekstar »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #404
tekstar wrote: post #260

I worked for a large e-commerce company. I wanted to investigate putting all our support data into Watson and see what sort of recommendations it could provide, maybe a sort of auto-suggestion to help our customers. Three really funny points stand out from the experience: 1) To apply for Watson access you needed to show C-level approval, so our CEO put his name and phone number on the application (trying Watson was s…

Everything about this sounds like they hired inexperienced sales people and promised them huge payouts if they could close certain deals. The kinds of sales people who won’t hesitate to burn a lot of customer relationships to the ground as long as they could close a few big deals for themselves.

That's what it felt like, yeah. Also that the tech wasn't able to prove itself so they kept it behind a curtain.

Multiple times they'd book a technical meeting to get us on-boarded and when I got on the call it was all sales people trying.

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