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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

#701

Post by vidarh »

scrubs wrote: post #560
vidarh wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. I'm not sure what your point is here, but based on Forbes 2000 for 2020 via Wikipedia [1], by market cap Tata Consultancy Services and Reliance are both larger than IBM. Both have grown faster than IBM since 2020. In terms of companies overall a number of other Indian companies are larger than IB…

2020? Big deal. IBM has been around for serious time. Like I said show me an Indian company that was a tech giant for analysis on the way down. No doubt IBM has got work to do. But tata ain't no ibm. Furthermore my take stands up for Indian know how not crapping on it as others have done here. It's just that indian companies nowhere near have ibm corporate legacy. As for ibm: it wouldn't kill you to try to innovate a…

> IBM has been around for serious time.

Tata is nearly half a century older than IBM. IBM is older than the TCS subsidiary, sure - TCS is "only" 54 years old. But I have no idea why that matters to your argument as it's still not clear to me why you were making the comparison.

That said, IBM does today have more employees in India than in the US, and IBMs current CEO is Indian-American, born in India and educated in part at an IIT so I can see why some would describe it that way. To me at least there's no value judgement - positive or negative - attached to that. It seems like you took offence at the comparison of IBM to an Indian company, and I can see why you'd think so in context, but I don't see why that justifies downplaying the success of companies like TCS.

> Like I said show me an Indian company that was a tech giant for analysis on the way down.

I still have no idea what you intend this to mean. TCS is a tech giant. It's the largest IT service company in the world.

As for Tata being no IBM, you're right, Tata Group is older and several times the size of IBM. The Tata Consultancy Services subsidiary alone is larger than IBM, and Tata as a whole employs about twice as many people as IBM, most in TCS. IBMs original business was thematically closer to what they still do today, I guess, but only marginally.

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

#702

Post by scrubs »

vidarh wrote: post #701
scrubs wrote: post #560

Earlier quoted context omitted.

2020? Big deal. IBM has been around for serious time. Like I said show me an Indian company that was a tech giant for analysis on the way down. No doubt IBM has got work to do. But tata ain't no ibm. Furthermore my take stands up for Indian know how not crapping on it as others have done here. It's just that indian companies nowhere near have ibm corporate legacy. As for ibm: it wouldn't kill you to try to innovate a…

> IBM has been around for serious time. Tata is nearly half a century older than IBM. IBM is older than the TCS subsidiary, sure - TCS is "only" 54 years old. But I have no idea why that matters to your argument as it's still not clear to me why you were making the comparison. That said, IBM does today have more employees in India than in the US, and IBMs current CEO is Indian-American, born in India and educated in…

>> Like I said show me an Indian company that was a tech giant for analysis on the way down.

>I still have no idea what you intend this to mean. TCS is a tech giant. It's the largest IT service company in the world.

What is so tough here understand here? I've done IT for 30 years. I don't think I've used a gadget, O/S, compiler, cloud resource, dev-ops, or distributed algo from Tata once. IBM? All day long. I consulted at AT&T ... man the number of things they made I used was insane.

Moreover, given time all large companies cycle between running on all 8 cylinders to periods where marketing, paper pushers, corporate culture BS, losing contact with customers and customer satisfaction, poor quality erode the top/bottom line, lead to a loss of market power, pricing power, and so on.

Tata, assuming it ever had the towering heights IBM hit on all fronts, may be big now. But wait around long enough and Tata like most large human organizations will fall from grace too. And I bet, at it's core, outsourcing will not be found to be root-cause; related perhaps but certainly blaming the outsiders isn't wisdom. So as I said, then re-said, and say again show me one of those Indian companies *who are on a down cycle now*. The way I have contextualized it here makes for a relevant comparison.

While I'm at it: I'll say again unlike posters earlier up, I refuse to crap on IBM because it out-sources to Indian companies. Like anywhere some Indian companies suck. Some don't. Some may be on a high cycle like Tata. Those in the US doing the outsourcing maybe already sucked before outsourcing began. It's those kinds of spurious insults which are not appropriate and not my position.

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

#703

Post by freewilly1040 »

mlindner wrote: post #633
alar44 wrote: post #459

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see the problem here, that was literally the point. To build a chess computer.

I think the above poster's point was that they think Watson's point was to build a Jeopardy machine (and hype).

The Jeopardy thing was pretty brilliant in a sense - wrangling an episode of free advertising from one of the most popular game shows. A memorable episode at that!

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

#704

Post by NicoJuicy »

stathibus wrote: post #590
NicoJuicy wrote: post #442

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many people think palantir cracked AI. While they are just using tensorflow and other things like anyone else. Additionally, large tech can't apply for defense contracts because of internal ethical concerns of employees. So the naritive remains.

"Just using tensorflow" is reductive. TF is a design tool, what matters is what you build with it.

Sure.

But having 'cracked AI' means you are the innovator. Not just using the tools ( eg. Compare that with Google & AlphaGo ).

We're not talking about the same things.

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

#705

Post by derefr »

nradov wrote: post #618
yellowapple wrote: post #613

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> To start with, every admitted patient has an assigned attending physician who is responsible for coordinating the care team. That's rarely (if ever) a 1:1 ratio. That attending physician is almost certainly juggling multiple patients. Same with the rest of the care team. There's a reason why the first thing one does when approaching a patient bed is to look at the chart. > Some things can be documented in the patie…

That's largely pointless. The critical data elements do get charted. But time spent closing data entry gaps on patient charts is time not spent actually caring for patients. There are simply not enough clinicians to do all that, or funding to pay them. Furthermore there are many aspects of patient conditions that can't really be coded in a useful way. A skilled, experienced clinician can intuit a great deal from subt…

> And in most routine cases the diagnosis is the easy part.

...which is why we shouldn't be wasting such valuable resources (people with an aptitude for medicine) on doing such an easy, routine task all day long, no? It'd be like if chefs spent most of their time hand-grinding spices rather than cooking.

> A skilled, experienced clinician can intuit a great deal from subtle signs like skin color, breathe sounds, tone of voice, small movements, etc. / Pattern recognition algorithms do have some promise for computer assisted interpretation of things like medical images and ECG waveforms where the input data is already in digital form.

You're seemingly contradicting yourself here: you're saying that the places where ML shows the most promise, are exactly with the tasks that would best replace the things doctors are doing. The only reason that ML can't do those things, is that people aren't putting data like "a video exam of the patient by a nurse" into the chart where the diagnostic algorithm can see it / be trained on it.

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

#706

Post by derefr »

robbiep wrote: post #431
nradov wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's simply false. You obviously have no idea how hospital care is actually delivered. To start with, every admitted patient has an assigned attending physician who is responsible for coordinating the care team. Some things can be documented in the patient chart but there are always gaps. Clinical decision support systems for partially automating diagnosis could potentially be helpful in some limited circumstances…

I’ll second how misguided that view of hospital care is. There is ALWAYS a treating team, always an admitting consultant/attending

Then where exactly does the oft-cited kafkaesque nightmare of being "lost in the US hospital system" come from (with patients put in the wrong wards and forgotten for sometimes months; given inappropriate medications that doesn't end up recorded; tested repeatedly for the same problems because the test results were "lost"; etc.)?

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

#707

Post by hiptobecubic »

deltaonefour wrote: post #105
hiptobecubic wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that's the wrong conclusion from this story. The conclusion I draw is that some companies (and Tesla in particular) don't appreciate the "last mile" when trying to apply AI breakthroughs to consumer products. "The plane lands safely 99% of the time" is an impressive demonstration and a completely worthless product, but if that's all you have then what can you do other than launch it?

Except all self driving AI companies have failed to achieve reliable AI. Every single one. So it says something about AI more than companies.

It says that (driving) AI is a rapidly changing technology, pushed along by these companies.

The definition of "reliable" here is also important. Usually this devolves into a series of moving goal posts ending with "if it can't do everything perfectly all the time then it's not real!"

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

#708

Post by deltaonefour »

hiptobecubic wrote: post #707
deltaonefour wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except all self driving AI companies have failed to achieve reliable AI. Every single one. So it says something about AI more than companies.

It says that (driving) AI is a rapidly changing technology, pushed along by these companies. The definition of "reliable" here is also important. Usually this devolves into a series of moving goal posts ending with "if it can't do everything perfectly all the time then it's not real!"

It's a fuzzy thing yes. But it is still clearly not safe to drive everywhere with AI. A claim was made by experts and leaders about AI how by now self driving cars would be ubiquitous. That claim was wrong. That does say something about AI. It is a counter claim against the initial claim.

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

#709

Post by ProAm »

spookthesunset wrote: post #263
ProAm wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Oracle has products to sell. IBM does not, and Google really does not either. GCP? Beyond that it's still largely just an ad company.

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

#710

Post by borski »

daenney wrote: post #281
borski wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are lots of reasons other than power to want people on-site. This is a strawman.

Mandating it is a power move. You can give folks the option to come back to the office if they so chose, and let others work from home if they want to.

This implies the company has set itself up to do remote work well. Not every company has, not even through the pandemic. Many are still struggling to get back to the performance they were once at.

It isn’t always a power move, even if HN wants it to be; and yes, I realize that’s an unpopular opinion here.

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