8 ms·

Isn't this just the same problem IBM has had for...well...most of my adult life? I had a contract gig at IBM Advanced Technology in Boca for about 18 months in

by cubano 8y ago

Isn't this just the same problem IBM has had for...well...most of my adult life? I had a contract gig at IBM Advanced Technology in Boca for about 18 months in early 2001-2002. Talk about missing the boat... I was brought in to prop up a soon-to-be-failed project for the Japanese government...basically a "Napster for Tokyo" that would allow paid-for-play C2C song sharing for customers of "the Big 5" record companies. I asked simple questions that no one could answer...why would people pay for content when it was so easily available via other means? you are using DRM how??? really? you need a special player to play the music? Why would anyone do that? I stayed for a few simple reasons...the fat consultant check I cashed every Friday. Exposure to some outstanding engineers and coders where I got to learn from true talent. The great strip club on A1A next to my rental in Lauderdale-by-the-Sea. But reading over this article reminds me that IBM is just too big to get out of its own way, and has been for the longest time. [edits]

foobaw 8y ago
I always thought Watson Health would be like a smaller spin-off product that wasn't influenced too much by IBM. T Given all the expectation of its product and the importance of ML/AI, it makes sense this was impossible.
bluetwo 8y ago
Getting a nice check while doing nothing actually productive is soul crushing. Good for the short term but it's a Chinese water torture in the long run. Two years ago at their vegas conference they had a coffee shop that used AI to recommend coffee types. I thought "boy, they don't understand this technology".
- pinewurst 8y ago
  Many years ago, when AI was expert systems and "neural networks" were fringe, the main demo for one of the public expert system leaders was the Wine Advisor. You'd tell it what you were going to eat and it would recommend a wine.
  - numbsafari 8y ago
    And behind the scenes it was probably the equivalent of flipping a coin between red and white.
    - pinewurst 8y ago
      It was totally rule-based. More complex systems had a little more probabilistic stuff via Bayes and "certainty factors", but not this one. I worked on another one for this company called Vibration Advisor which diagnosed odd noises in GM cars.
      - kprybol 8y ago
        Being rules based isn't necessarily a bad thing or disingenuous. I develop healthcare AI products (ML/DL researcher) and we actually aim to be able to translate our models into a rules based engine (find a strong signal, interpret/understand model well enough to translate/embed into a rules engine, look for a new signal in our models, rinse + repeat). We end up deploying a mix of rules based and true ML based models into production but it may not be immediately obvious to the end user which type of model they are using.
        pinewurst 8y ago
        I didn't mean it as being disingenuous - that's precisely the value that was sold and if you could do the proper "knowledge engineering", it worked well. It's just interesting to me having seen the previous turn of the AI hype wheel, how much is being repeated. Another interesting thing was the transition from special purpose hardware - Lisp machines - to C code on commodity platforms. A contrast from today's ML moving in the other direction.
        kprybol 8y ago
        That's fair. Google's recent paper on predicting patient deaths is another good example of this (logistic regression + good feature engineering performed just as well as their deep learning models, and the logistic regression has the added benefit of being significantly more interpretable and as a result, actionable). It'll be interesting to see when specialized ML focused silicon will become readily available. Right now I find ML libraries that are able to run on blended architectures (any combination of CPU and GPU's) much more exciting/impactful than TPU's. The ability to deploy on just about any cluster a customer may have available is huge.
- draw_down 8y ago
  Nearly everything about working in modern corporations is terrible, so a good paycheck and not-too-stressful working conditions are close to the best that most of us can hope for. Of course, there are those who make their way into the small clique of people at any tech company that get to do impactful, fulfilling work. But any given person is unlikely to be one of them, and if you want to be one of them you usually have to kill yourself working crazy hours first. (And probably afterwards too.)
- jupiter90000 8y ago
  What about getting a nice check while thinking you're doing something actually productive which ends up, in the final analysis, being meaningless? Alternatively, what about doing something that seems soul crushing and pointless but is actually productive?
- tootie 8y ago
  I'm living this right now and I hate it so, so much.
raverbashing 8y ago
> IBM is just too big to get out of its own way Brilliantly put Funny thing is, when it did get out of its own way, what did we get? The IBM PC
- hodgesrm 8y ago
  ...A very successful platform. Just not for IBM.
  - raverbashing 8y ago
    "Well, everybody knows the important part is the hardware. There's a Mr Gates from a company called Microsoft that can sell us the software"
  - Angostura 8y ago
    Well yes, that's because they immediately tried to differentiate themselves with fun stuff like Microchannel Architecture to try and make their machines proprietary again.
mindcrime 8y ago
I stayed for a few simple reasons...the fat consultant check I cashed every Friday. Exposure to some outstanding engineers and coders where I got to learn from true talent. The great strip club on A1A next to my rental in Lauderdale-by-the-Sea. Heh... I did some work for IBM at the office of Cypress Creek Road back in that same time range. My fondest memory of the entire experience is eating at the Calypso Restaurant[1], a great Jamaican / Caribbean Islands place nearby. I'd almost go back to Fort Lauderdale and work for IBM again (if they even still have a presence there) just for the Jamaican Jerk chicken from Calypso. [1]: http://www.calypsorestaurant.com/ http://www.calypsorestaurant.com/
DonHopkins 8y ago
I heard this joke years before working at Kaleida Labs (a joint venture of Apple and IBM), but it rang true while I was living the joke: Q: What do you get when you cross Apple and IBM? A: IBM. While I was working at Kaleida, I gave a wild ScriptX demo to Lou Gerstner using a bouncing eyeball to navigate a map of interactive rooms. After the demo, he complained that "The eyeball was a little too right-brained for me." I was all "Dag nab it, I should have used the other eyeball!!!" https://medium.com/@donhopkins/1995-apple-world-wide-developers-conference-kaleida-labs-scriptx-demo-64271dd65570 https://medium.com/@donhopkins/1995-apple-world-wide-develop... "The last thing IBM needs right now is a vision." -Lou Gerstner https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_V._Gerstner_Jr https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_V._Gerstner_Jr.

by cubano 8y ago

foobaw 8y ago

I always thought Watson Health would be like a smaller spin-off product that wasn't influenced too much by IBM. T Given all the expectation of its product and the importance of ML/AI, it makes sense this was impossible.

bluetwo 8y ago

Getting a nice check while doing nothing actually productive is soul crushing. Good for the short term but it's a Chinese water torture in the long run. Two years ago at their vegas conference they had a coffee shop that used AI to recommend coffee types. I thought "boy, they don't understand this technology".

pinewurst 8y ago
Many years ago, when AI was expert systems and "neural networks" were fringe, the main demo for one of the public expert system leaders was the Wine Advisor. You'd tell it what you were going to eat and it would recommend a wine.
- numbsafari 8y ago
  And behind the scenes it was probably the equivalent of flipping a coin between red and white.
  - pinewurst 8y ago
    It was totally rule-based. More complex systems had a little more probabilistic stuff via Bayes and "certainty factors", but not this one. I worked on another one for this company called Vibration Advisor which diagnosed odd noises in GM cars.
    - kprybol 8y ago
      Being rules based isn't necessarily a bad thing or disingenuous. I develop healthcare AI products (ML/DL researcher) and we actually aim to be able to translate our models into a rules based engine (find a strong signal, interpret/understand model well enough to translate/embed into a rules engine, look for a new signal in our models, rinse + repeat). We end up deploying a mix of rules based and true ML based models into production but it may not be immediately obvious to the end user which type of model they are using.
      - pinewurst 8y ago
        I didn't mean it as being disingenuous - that's precisely the value that was sold and if you could do the proper "knowledge engineering", it worked well. It's just interesting to me having seen the previous turn of the AI hype wheel, how much is being repeated. Another interesting thing was the transition from special purpose hardware - Lisp machines - to C code on commodity platforms. A contrast from today's ML moving in the other direction.
        kprybol 8y ago
        That's fair. Google's recent paper on predicting patient deaths is another good example of this (logistic regression + good feature engineering performed just as well as their deep learning models, and the logistic regression has the added benefit of being significantly more interpretable and as a result, actionable). It'll be interesting to see when specialized ML focused silicon will become readily available. Right now I find ML libraries that are able to run on blended architectures (any combination of CPU and GPU's) much more exciting/impactful than TPU's. The ability to deploy on just about any cluster a customer may have available is huge.
draw_down 8y ago
Nearly everything about working in modern corporations is terrible, so a good paycheck and not-too-stressful working conditions are close to the best that most of us can hope for. Of course, there are those who make their way into the small clique of people at any tech company that get to do impactful, fulfilling work. But any given person is unlikely to be one of them, and if you want to be one of them you usually have to kill yourself working crazy hours first. (And probably afterwards too.)
jupiter90000 8y ago
What about getting a nice check while thinking you're doing something actually productive which ends up, in the final analysis, being meaningless? Alternatively, what about doing something that seems soul crushing and pointless but is actually productive?
tootie 8y ago
I'm living this right now and I hate it so, so much.

raverbashing 8y ago

> IBM is just too big to get out of its own way Brilliantly put Funny thing is, when it did get out of its own way, what did we get? The IBM PC

hodgesrm 8y ago
...A very successful platform. Just not for IBM.
- raverbashing 8y ago
  "Well, everybody knows the important part is the hardware. There's a Mr Gates from a company called Microsoft that can sell us the software"
- Angostura 8y ago
  Well yes, that's because they immediately tried to differentiate themselves with fun stuff like Microchannel Architecture to try and make their machines proprietary again.

mindcrime 8y ago

I stayed for a few simple reasons...the fat consultant check I cashed every Friday. Exposure to some outstanding engineers and coders where I got to learn from true talent. The great strip club on A1A next to my rental in Lauderdale-by-the-Sea. Heh... I did some work for IBM at the office of Cypress Creek Road back in that same time range. My fondest memory of the entire experience is eating at the Calypso Restaurant[1], a great Jamaican / Caribbean Islands place nearby. I'd almost go back to Fort Lauderdale and work for IBM again (if they even still have a presence there) just for the Jamaican Jerk chicken from Calypso. [1]: http://www.calypsorestaurant.com/ http://www.calypsorestaurant.com/

DonHopkins 8y ago

I heard this joke years before working at Kaleida Labs (a joint venture of Apple and IBM), but it rang true while I was living the joke: Q: What do you get when you cross Apple and IBM? A: IBM. While I was working at Kaleida, I gave a wild ScriptX demo to Lou Gerstner using a bouncing eyeball to navigate a map of interactive rooms. After the demo, he complained that "The eyeball was a little too right-brained for me." I was all "Dag nab it, I should have used the other eyeball!!!" https://medium.com/@donhopkins/1995-apple-world-wide-developers-conference-kaleida-labs-scriptx-demo-64271dd65570 https://medium.com/@donhopkins/1995-apple-world-wide-develop... "The last thing IBM needs right now is a vision." -Lou Gerstner https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_V._Gerstner_Jr https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_V._Gerstner_Jr.