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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

#491

Post by lifewallet_dev »

opportune wrote: post #447
morpheuskafka wrote: post #436

As someone doing a CS degree now, I seem to be the only one who doesn't want to have anything on my resume to do with "AI", blockchain, ML, NFT, chatbots, etc... all I see is overhyped product after product, one-size-fits all solutions that frustrate customers and create problems for humans to clean up, hugely valued companies that have very little real improvement over conventional technology, etc. An "AI chatbot" i…

If you want to do something less buzzwordy with lots of real-life applications, look into distributed systems. Try running an Apache big data project yourself and write some programs/queries for it, try making a change to the project to do something cool. My suggestion to check out an Apache big data project is just that it gives you a good place to learn, not so you can be a "hadoop specialist" or anything like that…

Oh, so don't do current buzzwords but past ones like Big Data are okay.

And if you wanna learn about distributed systems nothing better than Bitcoin or any cryptocurrency based on a P2P protocol.

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

#492

Post by pram »

throwaheyy wrote: post #452
WrtCdEvrydy wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> an IBM marketing team called HIS CELL and asked for ME. What the fuck is this? A name/email for your company when trying something out is so that you can keep track of any support requests we need, not for you to sell shit to me.

Yeah, the whole culture there (and other places like Oracle) is all about implanting mindshare at the decision-maker level and driving unilateral adoption from the top down. Pursuing such an approach is highly revealing because if the technology actually worked , that approach would not be necessary. Once they’re “in” at the decision-maker level, they can continue to milk the organisation with long-duration support a…

Oh yeah I worked on a similar project at Oracle. The sales people basically sold the state on a 'stack' with a bunch of random horseshit that was magically supposed to work together and then dumped it on engineering. I mean that in a totally serious way, sales seemingly just grabbed a bunch of names of Oracle software and mashed it together. It literally never worked at any point.

Then Oracle sued THEM about it, lmao.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cover_Oregon

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

#493

Post by wildzzz »

aenis wrote: post #435
mrtksn wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 C…

Funny, similar thing happened to me. IBM along a few other behemots pitched for a serious project at a company I worked for as enterprise arch. All companies brought their top salespeople, and all tried nasty things, but IBM was by far the worst. Their top guy started their pitch by saying he chatted with our CEO over the christmas holidays. He mentioned - and I am not making this up - that he should be talking to pe…

It's because they want to talk to the most power in the decision but with the least information as to how the problem could be solved without the help of Oracle/IBM/whoever.

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

#494

Post by dllthomas »

formeribmer wrote: post #479

I worked at IBM Watson as one of the early engineers when they first started commercializing the product. It was a fucking joke - Ginni Rometty would go up on stage and said that Watson can help diagnose cancer from CT scans and we would just look at each other and be like "Dude, Watson is just a glorified Lucene index, wtf is she talking about." They started selling Watson as the end-all for everything from cancer d…

> they even had a stupid Watson chef thing at SXSW one year

I loved Chef Watson, am sad that it's gone, and would pay a small amount for renewed access.

It wasn't "smart", and its recommendations needed to be tempered with human understanding, but I wound up with some great recipes that I wouldn't have thought of otherwise.

I think the best was goat milk mac & cheese with radishes and red miso.

The funniest was when it told me to remove the connective tissue from tofu.

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

#495

Post by alfiedotwtf »

ogogmad wrote: post #464
trollied wrote: post #383

They are a nightmare. I was part of a huge project to replace a large part of a telecom operators infrastructure. IBM global services ran the operators IT outsourced. The project failed after a year because of them. It was the 3rd such project to fail. The company in question couldn’t bring themselves to realise it had been their outsourced operators fault once again. Even though they had again lost the bid to do sai…

I once went to a job interview at Accenture. I remember the recruiter told me they only considered me because I went to a prestigious university. When I got there, they practically IQ tested me, were rude to me, and never contacted me again even after they said they would. The job was to write GUIs in C#. Listen up Accenture, I will drink expensive champagne when you go bust, or get bought.

> drink expensive champagne when you go bust

You'll have to get in line

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

#496

Post by BlueTemplar »

ogogmad wrote: post #461

What's the chances that we'll have robotic domestic servants before 2032? With AlphaZero, AlphaFold and sort-of OK machine translation, I think it's 50:50, no?

But none of this matters that much for the hardest part : the robotics of it. You probably need to instead follow what Boston Dynamics is up to...

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

#497

Post by mrtksn »

sjg007 wrote: post #477
mrtksn wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 C…

What are these shirts? I must know!

I don't know but my manager was a non-technical guy with passion for fashion and even his shirts weren't as nice!

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

#498

Post by jonas21 »

morpheuskafka wrote: post #436

As someone doing a CS degree now, I seem to be the only one who doesn't want to have anything on my resume to do with "AI", blockchain, ML, NFT, chatbots, etc... all I see is overhyped product after product, one-size-fits all solutions that frustrate customers and create problems for humans to clean up, hugely valued companies that have very little real improvement over conventional technology, etc. An "AI chatbot" i…

Since you're still a student, I feel like maybe I can offer some advice:

First, I think you're getting the wrong lesson from this. The key takeaway is stay to away from IBM. Almost everyone in the field has known that Watson is a bunch of marketing hype since day one. It's no surprise that Watson Health didn't work out. That doesn't mean that everything is overhyped, and it's important to develop a good sense for what is and what isn't when deciding where to work.

Second, every technology looks stupid when it's new. Airplanes, computers, the Internet, mobile phones -- they all had drawbacks that made them vastly inferior to the alternatives for most tasks for the first years/decades of their existence. It takes a lot of iteration and improvement to make something that's useful for everyone. Chatbots will probably get there some day - but it will take some big improvements in NLP. Perhaps this is the time to be working on them since we have a good idea of what we'd like them to do, and we just need to solve the challenges to get there.

Finally, realize that you're not the typical user. I doubt if very many people take the time to go through the menus like you did.

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

#499

Post by humaniania »

jelling wrote: post #457
qaq wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kindah like Palantir

Ehh...I get why tech people are suspect of Palantir but they're just disrupting other government contractors. And from my limited experience working with the government, they absolutely need / want / rely on having companies hold their hand as they insist on doing things the hard, slow, and very custom way.

Because of Thiel's lack of ethics and his support for the political far right?

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

#500

Post by BlueTemplar »

telxosser wrote: post #295
sklargh wrote: post #21

Turns out advertising at every tennis major can't make you a leader in analytics, ML and basic managed services.

What data was it using again? The blood panel your doctor orders every one to two years? Medical diagnosis is a trivial problem for machine learning to beat humans. Humans are terrible at this. The problem is there is not even the concept of high frequency medical data. Imagine machine learning in quant stock trading with samples once a year. Of course it isn't going to work. The problem is all in the externalities.…

I'm not sure that it would be necessarily the doctor that would actually gets condemned in this case. Could as well / instead be the programmer(s) that made the AI.

But this is why the current crop of AIs (which Watson itself might NOT be part of) is problematic : they're too much black boxes.

So they directly clash with the laws that assume on one hand perfect transparency of the tools used, and on the other perfect responsibility of the people using them.

How long before the use itself of a neural network is deemed to have been illegal because it broke one of the laws mandating the explanation of the algorithm that has been used to make a decision to the person that this decision targeted ?

Eventually, way down the line, this might involve giving some kind of civil status to computer programs so they can actually be made responsible.

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