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IBM Watson Health slashes workforce
- oliviergg 8y agoVery sad for long time IBMers. But Is it the beginning of the much controversial AI Winter revival ?
- TaylorAlexander 8y agoIt seems Watson was founded on the false premise that lots of hand coded things could be called an “AI”. It’s the victim of its own winter, because it was never going to live up to its own hype.
- oliviergg 8y agoInteresting. Do you have some references about this 'hand coded things' ?
- waisbrot 8y ago"Hand-coded" may be an exaggeration, depending on your field. ML systems need good training data (where "good" might mean "extremely voluminous") and careful tweaking of parameters. I think an ML expert would call a system where a substantial amount of time is spent here "hand-coded".
- AdamM12 8y agoYeah I kinda remember reading it being accused of being vaporware. Then I googled "Watson vaporware" and got the following [1]. Definitely think they are in that part of the hype cycle. [1] https://www.technologyreview.com/s/607965/a-reality-check-for-ibms-ai-ambitions/ https://www.technologyreview.com/s/607965/a-reality-check-fo... edit: "trough of disillusionment" is what I was looking for
- darkerside 8y agoInteresting article, but I'd bet a big part of the reason physicians don't know it's that do much is dependent upon information that lives "out of the system". How much time will a patient spend on rehab, and will they actually perform the exercises effectively? What's their diet like, not just calories in but in terms of individual nutrients? How active is their lifestyle? Recovery time seems like something that should be knowable by educated doctors, but the best poker player in the world can't tell you what card is coming up on the river.
- raverbashing 8y agoI couldn't have put it better myself. Participating in Jeopardy was quite an achievement, but to extrapolate that system and selling it as a "solve all" is to over promise.
- jgalt212 8y agoTo be fair, it did more than participate. It dominated.
- dmreedy 8y agoDo you imagine that other, more successful "AI" services from large companies do not involve a lot of hand-coded things?
- throwawayok 8y agoYes. Well, at the very least, they don't involve only hand-coded things.
- thebluehawk 8y agoThe ones that aren't hand-coded tend to act poorly, or racist, or worst.
- randominternets 8y agoMy friend who survived the layoffs indicated that this was due to in large part changes in the political/regulatory landscape that made it so the companies they were working with would no longer require the features that IBM was providing.
- tango24 8y agoWhat changed?
- downrightmike 8y agoWatson could never really deliver on the AI healthcare integration and diagnostic support. Basically it became a status symbol for hospitals to have, but it was dead weight. https://www.statnews.com/2017/09/05/watson-ibm-cancer/ https://www.statnews.com/2017/09/05/watson-ibm-cancer/
- krona 8y agoThis isn't really anything to do with machine learning, and just IBM's inability to bring innovation to market (particularly in industry solutions.) What would you expect from a company run like a hedge fund by a bunch of marketing hacks? Half the original Watson research fellows and executives have left to start their own companies, having seen the writing on the wall years ago.
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- Bartweiss 8y agoIs there a full breakdown of scope anywhere? I know there have been major complaints about Watson Health before, but I still can't tell if this marks a retreat from the program, or just a harsher-than-usual instance of the sort of layoffs pretty common for acquisitions.
- phren0logy 8y agoI'm an MD, and I dabble in programming and AI/DL. While I don't really care much about Watson in particular, the pervasiveness of the "enter healthcare = death" equation is worrisome to me. And it should worry you, too. There's a lot of potential for good applications of this type of tech in healthcare, but the barriers to actually getting it off the ground strangle it in the crib.
- bitwize 8y agoI think this has more to do with the fact that Watson sucks than anything else, although it may be a harbinger for other efforts to sprinkle magic machine-learning pixie dust on complex problems in the hope for a solution.
- phren0logy 8y agoIn this case, you are probably right. But it seems to happen over and over again suggesting that the barriers to innovation are higher than they should be.
- serioussecurity 8y agoYeah, to be clear, Watson failing is good news. This is marketing people losing their minds because they didn't understand the products they were selling, and hospitals failing to do due diligence. I've talked to literally dozens of people / companies / academics running at problems in healthcare using deep learning and large data sets, and the recurrent theme is cowboys who pretty consistently fail to follow basic practices of experimental rigor. ML is frankly an area where more rigorous and clear regulation is desperately needed, because the potential to cut corners / cheat is so easy and the challenges of vetting these systems are specialized enough that most organizations won't successfully be able to catch fairly basic experimental mistakes.
- ISL 8y agoMany of those barriers have historical reasons for existing -- which do you think could be lowered without risking patient health (or yielding sufficient benefit to be worth some added risk)?
- Lendal 8y agoNo need for employees when Watson can do it all. Unbeknownst to these people, they renamed it Watson Health due to the fact Watson is going to run the entire division itself. Amazing! The future of AI is finally here! Watson has spent the last few years learning all these peoples' jobs.
- GavinMcG 8y agoThis sort of sarcastic, content-free comment doesn't contribute much, and isn't a great fit for this community.
- seibelj 8y agoI disagree, I think it is satire showing the over-hyped nature of Watson and AI in general during this latest VC investment boom. HN still has room for humor
- GavinMcG 8y agoI agree that there's room for humor. But for that, it should be well-written satire that makes that point. "[T]hey renamed it Watson Health due to the fact Watson is going to run the entire division itself" is a complete non-sequitur, just filling up space.
- Lendal 8y agoThat's not what a non sequitur is. Massive layoffs at a company that hypes its AI and is actually named after that same technology is called "irony", not non sequitur. I'm disappointed for having to explain this.
- ybrah 8y agoI disagree too. I think that humor should be allowed on hacker news. I mean as long as the jokes aren't at the expense of the ideology of the majority of hacker news's users. In that case, that humor should be downvoted and removed.
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- mlthoughts2018 8y ago> “The message was that there are about 7,000 people in Watson Health today and this was a cost-cutting exercise. 90 days’ notice with 30 days’ severance.” If accurate, that severance benefit is just shameful, and simply not good enough from a large corporation. Absolutely no excuse for that degree of unjustifiable, unmitigated greed to offer so little when possibly damaging lives, especially for older workers who may face IBM-like ageism elsewhere now too. Hard fought career advice I’ve learned: always negotiate adequate severance. It should be a heck of a lot more than 1 month, even if you’re a junior employee. Just turn down jobs if they won’t give substantial severance agreements. Unless you’re in dire straits & have to take the job. Otherwise, don’t do it. That employer will not consider the impact that some surprise layoff has on you. Get it in writing, up front in the negotiation, and don’t waste time with firms that won’t offer it. Not worth it.
- dudus 8y agoSeverance packets is probably not an easy thing to negotiate when you are trying to sign an employment contract.
- mlthoughts2018 8y agoIf it’s a serious company, it’s just an expected, standard part of negotiating, no different than salary, bonus, benefits, vacation, etc. In general, you should ask if you’ll be required to sign any NDA, non-compete, or non-disparagement agreements, either as part of a company handbook or as standalone documents. If so, the severance package should be commensurate with the duration and condition of those. It is common to negotiate severance equal to your salary for the duration covered by the agreements, or at least a large fraction like 30-50% of the duration, so a competitive severance package would certainly be in the range of 4-6 months of your base salary. You can also negotiate to have company-paid insurance benefits extend past your termination date as part of severance, to avoid needing COBRA in the US. The severance agreement should also cover anything like a company issued laptop, etc., if you are promised you can keep it after employment ends. To get this, they’ll likely require you to sign waivers to any additional monetary claims, and draconian IP, NDA, etc., agreements. And this is why you should force the issue of negotiating severance up front and why you should walk away from companies (like IBM) that won’t negotiate. Otherwise, they’ll announce the restructuring or layoff and then hold you over a barrel, by claiming you have to honor their company policy non-compete anyway, and pressure you to sign restrictive documents at your HR exit meeting, generally offering some insultingly low severance benefit, like only a few weeks or months of pay and no continuation of benefits. All of this advice is specifically for junior-level employees as well. Never let anyone treat you like you cannot negotiate severance just because you’re a junior employee. Walk away from those companies. For experienced employees, the amount of severance should absolutely be at least 6 months of pay and continued company-paid health coverage, and in many cases you can negotiate for it to fully match the duration of the non-compete or NDAs, usually 12 months. Above all, don’t accept any baloney nonsense about “standard policies” restricting severance to a small number of weeks of pay per each year of tenure, or any of that garbage. That’s just the standard line they feed to people who don’t negotiate. And if a company refuses to be flexible on it, walk away.
- seem_2211 8y agoIBM is a confusing one. For a while I was getting IBM powered blockchain ads coming through my Instagram feed, and I seem to remember stopping by their booth at Dreamforce a few years ago where Watson would help determine what candy they'd give you (or something like that). One thing I'd be interested to know is what they actually do vs. the marketing spin of what they do.
- nfriedly 8y agoI helped build that candy machine demo! It was admittedly kind of silly, but it was fun to do. Sadly IBM has changed a lot and I ended up in a different role not too long after, and then leaving the company entirely a year or so later. To answer your question, though, one of the things Watson actually did was pretty powerful speech-to-text and text-to-speech engines. Out of the box they were approaching the best in the business, and with some customisation they could beat any other solution available for purchase. It was also far easier to use in a web browser than any of the competition (I'm biased here - I wrote a lot of that code - but I don't believe I'm wrong.) I really enjoyed working with that part of Watson.
- pridkett 8y agoI also used to work for Watson. It remains one of the best jobs I've had. There's a number of useful services available through Watson on the IBM Cloud. I'm a little biased toward Watson Assistant which can be nicely customized and integrated with other solutions to create some terrific customized virtual agents. You can also easily train natural language systems using Knowledge Studio.
- BogdanPetre 8y agoI find the discussion relevant to Tesla's autopilot much?
- belthesar 8y agoI was hired by an acquired Watson Health division a little over a year ago, and after seeing the very confusing story of how IBM expects to grow and strengthen these disparate companies, I'm not surprised. I'm also saddened that some of my former colleagues were among those laid off.
- redshirt 8y agoNot surprising. Many “tech” companies enter the field with arrogance, thinking of course they can do health better. They unfortunately often have no comprehension of the regulatory regimes for the markets they enter and therefore the projects are doomed to failure before they start.
- mathattack 8y agoIBM seems expert at stealth layoffs. Possibly to avoid lawsuits? https://www.propublica.org/article/federal-watchdog-launches-investigation-of-age-bias-at-ibm https://www.propublica.org/article/federal-watchdog-launches...