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IBM Watson Overpromised and Underdelivered on AI Health Care

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Re: IBM Watson Overpromised and Underdelivered on AI Health Care

#61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my opinion you don't even need to be an expert. - if you're a generally competent, learned person - and the new product feels like a giant leap from anything that exists already - it's likely not all it claims to be.

I've always had a 20% threshold If anyone is promising a 20% or greater improvement over the current leaders, I immediately file it away as a scam until I see extraordinary proof. Other than some very immature industries, even 20% leaps don't happen without earth shattering once-in-a-generation breakthroughs. Some call me a pessimist, and occasionally I'm unfairly dismissive of new technologies. But for every one I g…

When Google first arrived, I’d say the improvement was way more than 20%. Did you experience that?

Re: IBM Watson Overpromised and Underdelivered on AI Health Care

#62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've always had a 20% threshold If anyone is promising a 20% or greater improvement over the current leaders, I immediately file it away as a scam until I see extraordinary proof. Other than some very immature industries, even 20% leaps don't happen without earth shattering once-in-a-generation breakthroughs. Some call me a pessimist, and occasionally I'm unfairly dismissive of new technologies. But for every one I g…

When Google first arrived, I’d say the improvement was way more than 20%. Did you experience that?

Search was not a mature industry at all.

Re: IBM Watson Overpromised and Underdelivered on AI Health Care

#63
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When Google first arrived, I’d say the improvement was way more than 20%. Did you experience that?

Search was not a mature industry at all.

Compared to AI? I wouldn’t say search was more immature than Cloud APIs for AI, if that comparison even makes sense.

Re: IBM Watson Overpromised and Underdelivered on AI Health Care

#64
post #3

Anything labelled 'Watson' should be seen as marketing, not product or consulting.

I was going to agree with you, but then my last name is Watson :-) Seriously, I used IBM Watson on a consulting project a little over two years ago and I was disappointed. To be fair I should take another look. IBM has bought some good companies whose work is exposed in BlueBiz and other web services and the permanent free tier levels they give away rival the free tier levels from GCP. I think AutoML and auto data sc…

I used some Watson stuff that came with another project as well.

It wasn’t bad at all, we didn’t cure cancer but it provided a not so awful way to do some basic ML workloads. The other problem is that IBM pitches Watson to anyone, and many of the customers lack the clue to utilize it.

Re: IBM Watson Overpromised and Underdelivered on AI Health Care

#65
post #21

To me, the main mistake was the series of commercials giving the strong impression that IBM already had this incredible Artificial General Intelligence that was indistinguishable from a highly intelligent human and was solving a myriad of difficult practical problems better than any expert. I suspect that most who were well-versed in AI felt the ads were disingenuous from the start. I know I did. I think the marketin…

IBM have been doing this since Deep Blue, if not older. It's their core business model: build cool tech demos and then sell consulting deployments that use nonexistent features of the tech

Re: IBM Watson Overpromised and Underdelivered on AI Health Care

#66
I always find it kind of silly when AI is just thrown into a field with the notion that they'll just deal with the messy, subjective and unstructured data (like hand written medical notes for example) as is. For me it makes much more sense to try to clean up and structure the data from the start instead. Maybe come up with some data acquisition compromise that is both UX friendly and give rise to more structure and consistency.

Re: IBM Watson Overpromised and Underdelivered on AI Health Care

#67
post #66

I always find it kind of silly when AI is just thrown into a field with the notion that they'll just deal with the messy, subjective and unstructured data (like hand written medical notes for example) as is. For me it makes much more sense to try to clean up and structure the data from the start instead. Maybe come up with some data acquisition compromise that is both UX friendly and give rise to more structure and c…

My company does machine learning checked by physical models. Our single biggest problem (and management is finally waking up to it) is curating the incoming data. And this is in a mature industry (oil & gas).

Re: IBM Watson Overpromised and Underdelivered on AI Health Care

#68
post #31
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Admittedly though given their pretty large size I can't name much else. Exactly. Even if 20,000 people worked on those supercomputers, mainframes and Watson, what do the other 350,000 employees work on? Consulting, and it's been that way since Gerstner.

and what is "consulting"?

Customer specific projects similar to what other integrators like Ericsson, Nokia (telco) and Accenture, ATOS, etc do elsewhere.

Re: IBM Watson Overpromised and Underdelivered on AI Health Care

#70
post #53

I was recently diagnosed with neuroendocrine cancer, which my PCP had been misdiagnosed for 10 years as IBS. This is more the norm than the exception for people with this type of cancer, Steve Jobs included. It's a perfect example of where AI can likely diagnosis what my PCP could not. AI tools need to find cancer problems to solve which are more suited to their capabilities. e.g. does anybody know of a company worki…

I'm am sorry to hear that. I don't know about companies, but cancer screening with machine learning is a very active topic in academia at least. Other topics include outcome prediction, and analysis of treatment alternatives.

Thanks. Actually, my cancer is very weak. On a scale of 1 to 10, it's aggressiveness is 1-2. But one of the liver tumors is very and will be removed soon. I am starting a side project to work on cancer screen if anyone can point me to anyone willing to partner on this, I would appreciate the help.
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