I imagine IBM quantum computing will go to same route. IBM has become a husk of its former self — mostly marketing, and generally 5-10 years behind the cutting edge.
IBM’s Watson Health is sold off in parts
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Re: IBM’s Watson Health is sold off in parts
#52I 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?
Re: IBM’s Watson Health is sold off in parts
#53I 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…
Although small in comparison, they also bought weather underground for a cool billion or so and completely ran it into the ground.
Re: IBM’s Watson Health is sold off in parts
#54I 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…
>that GPs in particular would be replaced by a lower-cost Watson descendant It is happening. They are called physician assistants and nurse practitioners, "supervised" by a doctor. I assume going forward, they will take more and more of the usual pink eye/ear infection/flu and other common work that does not require 6 to 8 years of post bachelor education.
Yep. The midlevels are supported by automatic protocols in Epic (e.g. sepsis, DKA -> put these dozens of orders in with 5 clicks) that physicians decide on and approve. They also rely more heavily on imaging instead of a physical exam and history. When unsure, they can consult a physician, even a specialist.
It’s a very polarizing topic in medicine that patients generally aren’t privy to. Especially for resident physicians who often make half as much as these midlevels yet have more education, there’s a lot of bitterness. The federal government is ultimately to blame… having a fixed number of residency spots to artificially limit the supply of new physicians is terrible, and this is the predictable result.
I think hospitals support inefficient midlevels because they can bill patients for the increased resource usage, but it’s not good for the system overall when unnecessary scans and consults are done, and more complex patients don’t get comprehensive care. Many foresee a two-tiered system developing, where the rich see physicians, and the poor see midlevels.
Re: IBM’s Watson Health is sold off in parts
#55What happens to all the people they paid up for the hire at the slick Astor Place office? https://www.businessinsider.com/ibm-watson-office-tour-2016-...
No post body was provided.
Re: IBM’s Watson Health is sold off in parts
#56I 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.
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 healthcare, even though the technology wasn’t there.
The divestiture is only for IP also, and it seems most people in the group will be laid off.
Re: IBM’s Watson Health is sold off in parts
#57I 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 coast on enterprise lock-in while pretending they are innovative by shoveling money into non-useful blockchain projects.
Re: IBM’s Watson Health is sold off in parts
#58IBM 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.
I attended a talk a few years ago given by one of the blockchain VPs at IBM.
It turned out that under the hood they were just using conventional distributed database technology. All marketing in order to get multiple companies to work together on shared systems.
Re: IBM’s Watson Health is sold off in parts
#59I 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…
I thought the same, but as I grow older, I believe people would reject this. Even a subpar human GP would be much more accepted than a computer. That's not necessarily true in some societies though, e.g. Japan probably would accept it.
That said, I would probably focus on fixing the system first in a way that a significant percent of population doesn't need to order fish medicine off amazon to get treatment.
Re: IBM’s Watson Health is sold off in parts
#60I 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…
I think they still make a lot of money from their legacy business, z/OS & mainframes, DB/2 etc still run basically all large banks, insurance companies and many other types of businesses. IBM can charge whatever they want for the hardware and services to support these things because their customers have no alternative. So they have just been farming this for decades, and can afford not to succeed at anything else (so they don't).