62 ms·

IBM’s Watson Health is sold off in parts

688 points by alexmorley 5y ago

lvl100 5y ago
The bigger and more interesting question for me right now is who’s going to be this decade’s IBM? I want to say Amazon.
hindsightbias 5y ago
Watson Health and Watson are not synonymous. Who gets to use the name, idk, but there are a hundred Watsony things in consulting.
civilized 5y ago
Who could have seen it coming? IBM created a machine that could win at Jeopardy, not a universal expert or problem solver. Say what you want about Google, but they didn't claim to solve any practical problems by creating AlphaZero.
- ProAm 5y ago
  Google is the next IBM.
  - derwiki 5y ago
    60 years of prosperity before the wheels start coming off? Probably
  - spookthesunset 5y ago
    I don’t know. Does google do consulting? IBM is its own category of tech company really… Oracle would fit the bill better.
    - ProAm 5y ago
      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.
- nwsm 5y ago
  Meanwhile Google is unfolding Google Health.
  - jonas21 5y ago
    Not sure what you mean by "unfolding". But, unlike Watson, Google Health seems to be building tools that may be useful for healthcare providers rather than just marketing hype. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=71DVIWZnOho https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=71DVIWZnOho
- zwischenzug 5y ago
  Tbf IBM didn't either when deep blue beat kasparov
mromanuk 5y ago
There should be a way to bet (short) against “projects” or products, not the whole company. When they hyped about Watson Health, I “knew” it will fail.
- cuteboy19 5y ago
  Sometimes companies use their failed or loss making products to help promote their successful products. YouTube is a prime example
  - frosted-flakes 5y ago
    What failed/loss-making products is Google using to promote YouTube?
    - donkarma 5y ago
      you think YouTube is profitable?
      - colinmhayes 5y ago
        Yes, I think youtube is making billions of dollars a year. Youtube's revenue was $25 billion last year. It's a mature product. You don't think it's making money?
        mardifoufs 5y ago
        Google still doesn't release the profit figures for youtube, only revenue. Even the revenue figure was a secret until 2--3 years ago, so it was probably not that high. If youtube was very profitable, I'm not sure why Google would hide it in its earnings since they almost always try to show how they aren't exclusively dependent on their search ad business. I'm not saying youtube does not make any profit at this point, but if it wasn't tiny there's no reason for them not to talk about it.
        5y ago
user3939382 5y ago
I 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.
- gexla 5y ago
  So, they invented a Mechanical Turk?
  - ta988 5y ago
    One that lost games yes.
- idontwantthis 5y ago
  Like in Neal Stephenson's Diamond Age with the on-demand voice actors. I wonder if that was a lack of imagination about what AI will become, or if it was prescience that AI will turn out to be cost ineffective or not capable for most uses.
- pram 5y ago
  Sounds like what happened at Theranos! I read the analysis Watson was generating was ultimately just ignored by doctors because it came to inaccurate conclusions, so that makes sense.
- absoluteharam 5y ago
  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.
  - 5y ago
czbond 5y ago
What was the deal with this? Was it that the internal management team just mis-managed the product they had?
- max_ 5y ago
  On a long enough time horizon, everyone's survival rate goes to zero. [0]: [Why Cities Keep on Growing, Corporations Always Die, and Life Gets Faster] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jOnWowd-7HQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jOnWowd-7HQ
- lotsofpulp 5y ago
  It was just IBM throwing stuff at the wall to try and keep up with big tech companies. They have been in decline for a long time, and I assume this marketing stunt did not fool anyone actually involved in the businesses of healthcare or tech.
- DebtDeflation 5y ago
  It wasn't a product. It was a business unit created by the acquisition of (at least) 4 separate companies that had wildly disparate products, data sets, and consulting teams. The only thing they had in common was the focus on healthcare (and even that could mean anything vaguely related to providers, payers, or life sciences). "Watson" in general evolved into little more than a branding that was applied to anything remotely related to AI, analytics, or data management.
  - fault1 5y ago
    It kind of sounds like a cautionary tale for other tech companies wading into the health space or medicine (e.g, calico, deepmind).
raverbashing 5y ago
"billed as a revolution in medicine" by whom? IBM's marketing department? Anything "Watson" (together with 95% of that company - optimistically) is marred too deep in bureaucracy and yes men to do anything productive and innovative.
- RotaryTelephone 5y ago
  Heh, imagine a comma "and yes, men, to do anything productive"
  - m2f2 5y ago
    Better still, no comma and no space.
ezconnect 5y ago
daniel-thompson 5y ago
This is kind of funny to see after reading the Tech Review's piece on Watson Health from 4 years ago (https://www.technologyreview.com/2017/06/27/4462/a-reality-check-for-ibms-ai-ambitions/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2017/06/27/4462/a-reality-c...). They were wrong on the outcome but right on the diagnosis - that the marketing got way ahead of the engineering.
sys_64738 5y ago
It might be successful if not lumbered with a dinosaur such as the IBM tag around its neck. Nobody I know looks to IBM for anything nowadays.
saxonww 5y ago
I 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 make astounding amounts of money while leaning heavily on their staff to actually handle patients and keep the business running. I thought it could help drugs get a little cheaper too, because there wouldn't be any point in the pharma companies sending out salespeople to do lunch seminars to convince the GPs to prescribe this or that drug (this still happens). Maybe this will still happen, but it doesn't seem imminent anymore.
- Aeolun 5y ago
  > GPs often make astounding amounts of money while leaning heavily on their staff to actually handle patients and keep the business running I’ve seen this in Japan (ish), but in the Netherlands it’s definitely the GP’s doing most of the job. The assistant just does bookings and waves me in when it’s my turn.
- hiptobecubic 5y ago
  I thought we'd have banned Dr lobbying by now, even without a technological revolution.
  - bigbillheck 5y ago
    We haven't banned other kinds of lobbying, why would doctors be different?
  - jac241 5y ago
    I thought we’d have banned software engineer lobbying by now, look how much harm they’re causing - https://www.healthline.com/health-news/social-media-use-increases-depression-and-loneliness https://www.healthline.com/health-news/social-media-use-incr...
  - robotresearcher 5y ago
boboche 5y ago
IBM 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.
- shane_b 5y ago
  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.
  - beckingz 5y ago
    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.
    - shane_b 5y ago
      I believe it. There’s value in shared systems but not necessarily a special data store.
  - lotsofpulp 5y ago
    Based on their lack of competitive pay, I assume IBM does or will end up competing with TCS, Cognizant, Infosys, etc.
  - sadwings 5y ago
    > one of the only if not the only enterprise "permissioned" blockchain projects Not quite, check out Corda's R3 project - it's already being widely used in enterprise and projects are being built on top of it.
    - shane_b 5y ago
funstuff007 5y ago
What 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-2016-12 https://www.businessinsider.com/ibm-watson-office-tour-2016-...
- draw_down 5y ago
seibelj 5y ago
A friend of mine wanted to show off his Tesla by making it come to the front of the restaurant from where he parked it. Like he hit a button and it was to drive up. It got stuck somehow and was diagonal in the row. He was like “ehh sometimes it doesn’t work.” AI in general is very over stated. When it works it’s great, when it doesn’t (which is often) then you lose all trust in it.
- hiptobecubic 5y ago
  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?
  - deltaonefour 5y ago
    Except all self driving AI companies have failed to achieve reliable AI. Every single one. So it says something about AI more than companies.
    - hiptobecubic 5y ago
      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!"
      - deltaonefour 5y ago
        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.
rvense 5y ago
The technology they sent on Jeopard answered a question, I think, that was looking for the name of a specific king of Egypt with "What are trousers?". Seems pretty obvious that anything that would do that is not human-like intelligence, and probably the search results should be taken with a handful of salt even if they stuck some impressive natural language generation after it.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- newsbinator 5y ago
  I'm okay with this: humans likely make hilariously bad guesses about things that are obvious and easily accessible to machines, and therefore the reverse is also true. Guessing "what are trousers" for king of Egypt isn't in itself an indicator the whole Watson system is flawed. Although you're right: it's an indicator the intelligence is non human-like. Just like, from Watson's perspective, a human named John making hilariously bad guesses related to coin flips isn't in itself an indicator that John isn't intelligent either. Just that there are some categories of knowledge or application of that knowledge that some systems are bad at handling.
  - akira2501 5y ago
    Humans understand the value of saying "I don't know" then their internally measured probability of accuracy is very low. AIs don't seem to have that "gate," and to a human, it does make them appear to be very 'foolish' machines.
    - ravi-delia 5y ago
      That's really a choice. I mean most machine learning models wind up outputting a confidence distribution over possible outputs, so it's up to the user to decide how to extract an answer from that. They can and do have low confidence when they aren't sure.
    - oneoff786 5y ago
sklargh 5y ago
Turns out advertising at every tennis major can't make you a leader in analytics, ML and basic managed services.
- mnd999 5y ago
  They’re good at scoreboards though. Although the Wimbledon one did break down during Isner vs Mahut.
- telxosser 5y ago
  What data was it using again? The blood panel your doctor orders every one to two years? Medical diagnosis is a trivial problem for machine learning to beat humans. Humans are terrible at this. The problem is there is not even the concept of high frequency medical data. Imagine machine learning in quant stock trading with samples once a year. Of course it isn't going to work. The problem is all in the externalities. Doctors don't want AI. They can see the automation path and their bank account change down the line quite clearly. Not to mention most doctors don't know anything about data science so how can you have any faith in the algorithm prediction? No one wants to be the test case and then get a law suit. "I was just following what the computer said was correct". Wrong answer, pay up. The real irony to me is in a 100 years people look at the current medical system as complete quakery. Literally have everything right now to build medical super intelligence but stuck with the human doctors doing the exact same things from 50 years ago.
  - rurp 5y ago
    I agree with this so strongly. The medical gatekeeping is absolutely absurd. I can't remember the last time I learned something from a doctor that I hadn't already learned myself with a quick online search. For every visit in the past decade or longer they either told me what I already knew or we were both stumped. If drives me crazy that I can't make my own decisions about my own health, even for trivial cases. I've spent countless hours and dollars going to pointless doctor visits just to get a routine refill. Literally the conversation at most of these visits is as simple as me telling the doc that everything is fine with $medA, lets just keep it the same; followed by the doctor saying sure and writing me a new script. Such a massive inefficient waste of time.
hayesall 5y ago
Article is paywalled, but this story has evolved over the last few weeks: - 2022-01-05: "Scoop: IBM tries to sell Watson Health again" https://www.axios.com/ibm-tries-to-sell-watson-health-again-82f691a4-ab81-4b2b-a5bb-13a7556c8ef1.html https://www.axios.com/ibm-tries-to-sell-watson-health-again-... - 2022-01-07: "IBM reportedly shopping Watson Health just as healthcare gets hot" https://techcrunch.com/2022/01/07/ibm-reportedly-shopping-watson-health-just-as-healthcare-gets-hot/ https://techcrunch.com/2022/01/07/ibm-reportedly-shopping-wa... A lot of the hope seemed to be in document summarization from the latest medical literature, plus integrating patient data from electronic medical records. The autopsy of this could be interesting. Some of the critiques against using electronic health records previously was that many of them were designed for medical billing (I don't have a good link, but Eric Topol's "Deep Medicine" has some notes on this problem https://www.basicbooks.com/titles/eric-topol-md/deep-medicine/9781541644649/ https://www.basicbooks.com/titles/eric-topol-md/deep-medicin...).
cube00 5y ago
It will be interesting to see if self driving cars and the way they've been rushed to market with the same brute force marketing will meet a similar fate.
- cnlwsu 5y ago
  Self driving cars are not made by IBM. I wouldn’t consider their utter failure at everything they touch to be a sign that that AI field failed.
  - echopurity 5y ago
  - jjcon 5y ago
    Agreed, AI is just like any software. There are good, bad, scammy and brilliant examples of it. With AI somehow though people like to use one bad example as a referendum on everything. I think I understand why (because AI as a term is overloaded by marketing teams), but the inclination is to paint with a broad brush is still inaccurate here.
  - laurent92 5y ago
    Yes. The IBM Rationale suite failed even though it wasn’t AI. It’s the IBM way they commercialize things by going to golf with execs which is the problem.
- xnx 5y ago
  Google started its self driving project 13 years ago. It doesn't seem like they're rushing anything.
- mnd999 5y ago
  Self driving cars are just that, marketing. Tesla for all their hype have limited driver assist only and even Google who seem to have the most advanced offering only works in limited areas in good conditions and the dataset that drives it requires lots of maintenance. The general problem is too hard, and general practice has some of the same problems. Probably less adversarial data, but there’s still litigation to be had from confusing an AI GP. Or narcotics.
kumarvvr 5y ago
History will see our current decade of AI and only see over promises and under deliveries. I have decent amount of hope for AI, but corporate greed, hype by practitioners, a general explosion of various edTech companies hyping up the hype to drive online course sales and general excess of VC money is driving an embarrassing amount of AI failures. I am sure that any fad now and in the future, will have a similar cycle.
- bpiche 5y ago
  Nothing to be afraid of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_winter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_winter
JohnJamesRambo 5y ago
You can count on it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gartner_hype_cycle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gartner_hype_cycle
ramphastidae 5y ago
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.
nickysielicki 5y ago
I 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 blew their budget on marketing (remember Watson on Jeopardy?) The final straw for me was watching football with a techhy friend and a commercial for IBMs “hybrid cloud” came on. There’s some executive mulling over whether to “go to the cloud” or whether to go with on premises, and they have a eureka moment where they learn about IBM hybrid cloud and they go into a board meeting and save the day. We both just burst out laughing. IBM doesn’t make stuff anymore. That’s the core problem.
- bastardoperator 5y ago
  Easy. Governments, emerging countries, and heavy handed consulting. Once you're on their garbage it becomes near impossible to leave it.
- 300bps 5y ago
  They’re a public company. Here’s how they make money: https://www.ibm.com/investor/att/pdf/IBM-2Q-Earnings-Press-Release.pdf https://www.ibm.com/investor/att/pdf/IBM-2Q-Earnings-Press-R...
  - stefan_ 5y ago
    That's a joke. If you read that drivel prepared for the stock market, you would come away thinking IBM is the biggest Cloud operator in the world. In reality of course they have just rebranded all kind of cash flow streams as "cloud" - because they know "cloud" will make the stock go up whereas "mainframe" makes it go down.
    - rbanffy 5y ago
      They also provide mainframe-based Linux VMs for clients that require the encryption technology built into those machines. If you need to give certain assurances by law or contract, they may be a good option. Apart from that, if you need on-demand VMs for IBM i or AIX, they are one of your only options.
lumost 5y ago
Anecdotally, the main business value I've seen from ML/AI tech has been in cases where 1. A basic solution shipped and made a ton of money e.g. Ads, Search, recommendations etc. 2. It is financially feasible to have a dedicated team(s) make small incremental progress on these solutions. Even very small gains are beneficial. 3. The business perceives a threat if they fall behind in this area. The thing is that the gains on the basic solution (heuristics, off the shelf pre-trained CV model, open voice recognition) are pretty small, and if the threat of others making progress goes away - the inferred value of further investment will probably vanish as well. Other applications which put the AI in the driver's seat (sometimes literally) seem far from production - or if they do work, then they work reasonably well using an alternate approach from what you might expect.
transfire 5y ago
The only real business problem is they didn’t program Watson to do what the Healthcare industry actually wants — make more $$$$$. The last thing they want is a computer that can actually diagnose people and provide effective solutions.
- tomrod 5y ago
  > The last thing they want is a computer that can actually diagnose people and provide effective solutions. Intimately knowing the non-profit side of the healthcare system as well as the construction and operation of data science systems, I wholeheartedly disagree with your assertion and your conclusion as being a general takeaway.
  - stillworks 5y ago
    Can you possibly provide some objective comments on why that comment may be incorrect ?
    - tomrod 5y ago
      Here is a submarine Wired article on what Watson promoters expected it to do -- which supports what the parent commenter thought, the focus being on "bottom-line": https://www.wired.com/insights/2015/02/what-can-watson-do-for-your-company/ https://www.wired.com/insights/2015/02/what-can-watson-do-fo... Here is insight into how non-profit and community health programs are funded: https://www.parklandhospital.com/financial-summary https://www.parklandhospital.com/financial-summary Here is a section of Healthcare new dedicated to AI/ML implementations and other related events: https://www.healthcareitnews.com/topics/artificial-intelligence https://www.healthcareitnews.com/topics/artificial-intellige... Here is CMS's directive for hospital price transparency: https://www.cms.gov/hospital-price-transparency https://www.cms.gov/hospital-price-transparency The parent comment assumed that everything in healthcare is profit-motive driven. However, there are large portions of the healthcare industry that are non-profit, that are transparent in their funding and their costs, and that are looking to implement AI to improve healthcare outcomes. Parkland Health and Hospital System, Harris Health System, University Health System are some that I am more familiar with that run with this (PHHS recently achieved HIMMS Level 7 certification, for example). These are social safety-net hospitals and healthcare systems -- they care for everyone regardless of ability to pay. They focus not only on emergency and inpatient care, but also ambulatory care, primary care, and even fund (at arm's length) community (non-profit) medicaid insurers. On a more subjective side, I've seen a lot of folks out to make a buck, but the non-profit healthcare side has been much more focused on patient outcomes.
pettycashstash2 5y ago
IBM has a large consulting business. They make a lot of money on Services.
- nwsm 5y ago
  That business was spun off into Kyndryl.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
perardi 5y ago
I worked for one of the companies that IBM acquired to make this non-product. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-merge-healthcare-m-a-ibm/ibm-to-buy-merge-healthcare-in-1-billion-deal-idUSKCN0QB1ML20150806 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-merge-healthcare-m-a-ibm/... I have no idea what they got for the money they spent. Merge Healthcare was the most miserable work experience I have ever had. They had patents, I guess, but the actual technology was garbage. And the owner was…a piece of work, let's say that. https://www.npr.org/2018/12/12/675961765/tribune-tronc-and-beyond-a-slur-a-secret-payout-and-a-looming-sale https://www.npr.org/2018/12/12/675961765/tribune-tronc-and-b...
- lvl100 5y ago
  Healthcare IT is all garbage. It’s as if the people who invested in the space specifically did not want any of the inefficiencies to go away.
  - goodluckchuck 5y ago
    The inefficiencies are where all the money is made. After all, patients don’t pay and they certainly don’t pay for results. Patients may pay for insurance, and buy the right to not worry. Insurance delivers peace of mind by with appointments, papers, and pills. Look at all the bureaucracy and money, it must be fancy and effective. In the course of producing these papers are human doctors, nurses, coders, etc. They sometimes feel a sense of human decency and help people pro bono.
- jackcosgrove 5y ago
  > Merge Healthcare was the most miserable work experience I have ever had. Was it the orange ties?
  - perardi 5y ago
    Ha, in a way. Because they were indicative of Ferro’s “leadership”: flashy branding gimmicks, with nothing to back them up. Like when he bought an orange Tesla roadster to bring to trade shows. He’d just pop an orange car in the middle of the booth. What’s that got to do with health care? I dunno. (And this was all a while ago, but this job just always stuck in my craw, because it made “Silicon Valley” feel like an understated documentary and not a parody.)
throwawayay02 5y ago
To the surprise of no one who ever paid attention.
anm89 5y ago
I don't know if I'm the only one, but I always felt like Watson was roleplaying being a relevant tech company. Something about the way they marketed it just seemed like it was a big PR campaign with no meat behind it. I always had a suspicion that most people agreed but was never really sure.
bilekas 5y ago
Is it possible to get a non paid link ?
tomrod 5y ago
This is wholly unsurprising. IBM's big play was to integrate data science methods into the workflow. But they approached it from a "we will replace your labor costs" versus "we will augment your labor costs." Besides their AI models being fairly poor in quality, technology doesn't replace people very well where extrapolation is needed. So the quality of service Watson brought was significantly lower than what these businesses offered prior to adoption. So keeping Watson became an exercise in how well the business understands sunk costs and switching costs.
- lvl100 5y ago
  This so much. They basically let Snowflake (among others) eat their lunch. Back in 2015, IBM actually had a good chance but leadership just dropped the ball.
jollybean 5y ago
John Kelly on Charlie Rose, 2016 worth a gander [1] [1] https://charlierose.com/videos/29530 https://charlierose.com/videos/29530
achow 5y ago
Non-Paywalled https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/21/business/ibm-watson-health.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/21/business/ibm-watson-healt... https://archive.fo/uFNnJ https://archive.fo/uFNnJ The business is being sold for an undisclosed price to Francisco Partners, a private investment firm.. Watson Health was set up as a separate business in 2015. IBM then spent more than $4 billion to acquire companies with medical data, billing records and diagnostic images on hundreds of millions of patients.
cantrememberpw8 5y ago
I'm excited by this. I recently left Red Hat for greener pastures. From where I sat, IBM was slowly turning toward wisdom again, having been run aground by its previous few CEOs. I was skeptical when IBM bought Red Hat, but after several years of not screwing it up, I'm pretty hopeful. Now, Krishna is working on streamlining the business and making the rest of IBM more like Red Hat. Splitting off the low performing Kyndryl, and selling Watson, are part of this by cutting obsolete sectors; focusing on getting Red Hat the resources it needs to rapidly accelerate, and on building the talent pool by hiring more junior engineers, are the positive changes working to turn IBM back into a powerhouse.
- kumarvvr 5y ago
  Curious, what does RedHat actually do ?
  - leokennis 5y ago
    They make sure enterprises can run Linux that doesn’t “suddenly” (read: with less than 2-3 years notice) break their critical workflows because some component loses support or some dependency reaches EOL - they do this by extended maintenance, backporting (security) patches to old versions, providing tailored support etc. This is very valuable to enterprises and so they pay a lot for it. For example, you can still run Red Hat 6 safely and securely until 2024; by that point Red Hat 8 will have been out for 5 years already.
    - staz 5y ago
      To save you a web search : Red Hat 6 was relased 6 November 2010. Roughly 1 year after Window 7, which ended support 2 weeks ago.
      - KindOne 5y ago
        Windows 7 went EOL in on Jan 14, 2020. Are you talking about the Extended Security Update? That ends Jan 10, 2023. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/lifecycle/products/windows-7 https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/lifecycle/products/windows-...
captainmuon 5y ago
I think "Watson" was never a thing (a technology or a product). Rather it was a marketing term. "Watson" meant any solution or research project that was developed by IBM and had remotely to do with AI. A bit like "Active*" or "NET" back in the day for Microsoft.
- Forge36 5y ago
  Capitalize on the "machine learning" hype with a unique name sold as a developed product?
tekstar 5y ago
I worked for a large e-commerce company. I wanted to investigate putting all our support data into Watson and see what sort of recommendations it could provide, maybe a sort of auto-suggestion to help our customers. Three really funny points stand out from the experience: 1) To apply for Watson access you needed to show C-level approval, so our CEO put his name and phone number on the application (trying Watson was somewhat his idea). A few months later, an IBM marketing team called HIS CELL and asked for ME. Imagine how it felt to have the CEO walk up to me, deadpan hand me his personal iphone and say "It's for you.".. 2) They told me they'd help me with the support data idea, and every meeting we set up they tried to pitch "what if we put Watson on all of your customer's storefronts, we could add a 'powered by watson' banner on every page, and you give us a cut of GMV?". I pivoted them to our plugin framework and told them to build it themselves. 3) To demo the technology, the first step was to buy a $250k server from IBM. To demo it. Big LOLs all around, never trust big blue.
- WrtCdEvrydy 5y ago
  > an IBM marketing team called HIS CELL and asked for ME. What the fuck is this? A name/email for your company when trying something out is so that you can keep track of any support requests we need, not for you to sell shit to me.
  - throwaheyy 5y ago
    Yeah, the whole culture there (and other places like Oracle) is all about implanting mindshare at the decision-maker level and driving unilateral adoption from the top down. Pursuing such an approach is highly revealing because if the technology actually worked, that approach would not be necessary. Once they’re “in” at the decision-maker level, they can continue to milk the organisation with long-duration support and consulting contracts, feeding parasitically and gradually becoming more and more entangled. One spectacular example, 7M budget but in actuality, 1.2B down the drain and nothing to show for it https://blog.beyondsoftware.com/the-queensland-health-payroll-fiasco https://blog.beyondsoftware.com/the-queensland-health-payrol...
    - 5y ago
umangkeshri 5y ago
back in 2016 I joined my first company as Fresher and was excited to work in the use case of Ml and was given my first project for making chat bots using IBM Watson Conversation :P I think that is the worst project i have done in my life till now.
lettergram 5y ago
There were many, myself included, who called Watson vaporware since day one. Glad to see it go. It was almost as bad as Theanos, frankly.
sputr 5y ago
>that GPs in particular would be replaced by a lower-cost Watson descendant Everybody is trying to replace GPs (and even specialists) with AI. But I've experienced a massive issue in healthcare that does not need an AI, just a good database. I was prescribed intensive imunorepresive therapy... and they forgot to put me on preventative antibiotics. If there was a very simple IF on my prescription (if Medrol > 16mg && TimeOnMedrol > 3 months { checkIfOnAntibiotics() } ) I would not have almost died with a PCP pneumonia. Engineers always focus on the interesting technical innovation. But we have so much low-hanging fruit still to do, that just needs to use our existing technical abilities in really, really boring ways.
- sedachv 5y ago
  > If there was a very simple IF on my prescription This was supposed to be solved by rule-based/expert systems in the 1980s AI bubble.
  - sputr 5y ago
    The "was supposed" is the point of my comment. It wasn't. Yeah, there are a lot of systems like these who do some part of this, but it's far, FAR from a solved issue.
wslh 5y ago
I am aware that a friend's very small company related to NLP/NLU[1] beat IBM in a sale because the algorithms worked better than the Watson ones what seems incredible in two things: beating them at sales and technologically. [1] https://natural.do/en/ https://natural.do/en/
nickdothutton 5y ago
Watson is a great example of what happens when your marketing is better than your product, or to be more accurate technology toolkit. IBM will probably send RH the same way as they sent Softlayer.
whoopdedo 5y ago
The grand demonstration of Watson playing Jeopardy ended with the question to an answer about U.S. Cities being "What is Toronto?"
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
crispyambulance 5y ago
I wonder where the search engine Blekko ended up? It was acquired by IBM for use in Watson back in 2015. Blekko was an interesting attempt at addressing search engine problems using a thing called "slashtags" to better categorize searches.
hn_throwaway_99 5y ago
Can we post a non-paywalled version of this news? TechCrunch has a better version of this IMO: https://techcrunch.com/2022/01/21/francisco-partners-scoops-up-remains-of-ibms-watson-health-unit/ https://techcrunch.com/2022/01/21/francisco-partners-scoops-...
trollied 5y ago
They are a nightmare. I was part of a huge project to replace a large part of a telecom operators infrastructure. IBM global services ran the operators IT outsourced. The project failed after a year because of them. It was the 3rd such project to fail. The company in question couldn’t bring themselves to realise it had been their outsourced operators fault once again. Even though they had again lost the bid to do said work. PwC/Accenture were worse. Hire arts graduates because they got a degree from a good university, chuck them on a 2 month coding/consulting course. Happy days $$$
- ogogmad 5y ago
  I once went to a job interview at Accenture. I remember the recruiter told me they only considered me because I went to a prestigious university. When I got there, they practically IQ tested me, were rude to me, and never contacted me again even after they said they would. The job was to write GUIs in C#. Listen up Accenture, I will drink expensive champagne when you go bust, or get bought.
  - alfiedotwtf 5y ago
    > drink expensive champagne when you go bust You'll have to get in line
  - 7thaccount 5y ago
    Not getting contacted again was probably a blessing in disguise. They don't really do much, but kind of act like PMs, but aren't very effective as they don't know the business very well. I think they're generally only used when a company temporarily needs like 20 warm bodies to assist with a large project.
    - curiousllama 5y ago
      You’re right, but off by a few orders of magnitude. Think “need 200, get 2000” warm bodies
sdenton4 5y ago
The American healthcare system is littered with the dead bodies of both startups and large tech companies...
JCM9 5y ago
Watson was mostly data science powered consulting pretending to have/be a product. They played heavily on the Jeopardy thing from a marking standpoint but what they were actually trying to sell was a hot mess. I do consider this a good milestone in getting past the latest “AI” hype cycle and focusing on what actually works in that space. Sat through too many meetings with non-technical execs saying “what if we apply Watson here?”. The likes of McKinsey were pushing this stuff hard in what they were whispering into executives ears.
pb060 5y ago
Wish they had resumed IBM Chef Watson, it was completely useless and the exotic ingredients made the recipes impossible to prepare, but for a while it was my favorite procrastination activity
morpheuskafka 5y ago
As someone doing a CS degree now, I seem to be the only one who doesn't want to have anything on my resume to do with "AI", blockchain, ML, NFT, chatbots, etc... all I see is overhyped product after product, one-size-fits all solutions that frustrate customers and create problems for humans to clean up, hugely valued companies that have very little real improvement over conventional technology, etc. An "AI chatbot" is far inferior to a real user interface. A real user interface allows discoverability (looking through menus to notice functions that may be useful later), experimentation, and puts the user in control of the program. For example, my bank apparently only supports viewing the reason for card declines through the chatbot--something I never knew, because I took the time to go through the menus when I first got the app and learn what functions existed.
- opportune 5y ago
  If you want to do something less buzzwordy with lots of real-life applications, look into distributed systems. Try running an Apache big data project yourself and write some programs/queries for it, try making a change to the project to do something cool. My suggestion to check out an Apache big data project is just that it gives you a good place to learn, not so you can be a "hadoop specialist" or anything like that. There is way more real world usage of the distributed systems concepts and skills you'd learn there (especially in large tech companies) than any other flavor of the month. While ML is also commonly used in the industry, the signal:noise is really bad, because a lot of its uses are superfluous buzzword-driven development. However, many many companies rely on distributed systems to be able to operate at scale.
  - rlayton2 5y ago
    Absolutely. I often joke that my work as a data scientist is mostly creating bar graphs for people. The actual analysis is often reasonably simple, its the aggregating of the data that is hard (its messy, its not all in the one spot and there is lots of it). So start with querying your big data to say what the top three event types are. Then slowly crank up the analysis complexity, but not too much. The data engineering has lots of scope for real solid and obvious applications.
  - 5y ago
avrionov 5y ago
Many people shame the startups for fake it until you make it, but IBM with Watson and Watson Health did exactly that for years and 'serious' analysts were predicting how their healthcare AI efforts will increase their revenue. Compare their results with Tesla.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
amelius 5y ago
Did they sell their contracts for collecting patient data as well?
ogogmad 5y ago
What's the chances that we'll have robotic domestic servants before 2032? With AlphaZero, AlphaFold and sort-of OK machine translation, I think it's 50:50, no?
- Barrin92 5y ago
  as in physical android ones? More like 2:98. I'd be very astonished if we see a robot plumber by 2050.
  - ogogmad 5y ago
    Plumbing seems harder than loading and unloading a dish washer. Or doing laundry.
- BlueTemplar 5y ago
  But none of this matters that much for the hardest part : the robotics of it. You probably need to instead follow what Boston Dynamics is up to...
formeribmer 5y ago
I worked at IBM Watson as one of the early engineers when they first started commercializing the product. It was a fucking joke - Ginni Rometty would go up on stage and said that Watson can help diagnose cancer from CT scans and we would just look at each other and be like "Dude, Watson is just a glorified Lucene index, wtf is she talking about." They started selling Watson as the end-all for everything from cancer diagnosis to customer service chat - they even had a stupid Watson Chef thing at SXSW one year - but none of that used the original Watson codebase - it was all built from the ground up and lots of it was just simple logistic regression
- osipov 5y ago
- dllthomas 5y ago
  > they even had a stupid Watson chef thing at SXSW one year I loved Chef Watson, am sad that it's gone, and would pay a small amount for renewed access. It wasn't "smart", and its recommendations needed to be tempered with human understanding, but I wound up with some great recipes that I wouldn't have thought of otherwise. I think the best was goat milk mac & cheese with radishes and red miso. The funniest was when it told me to remove the connective tissue from tofu.
  - mNovak 5y ago
    I remember reading some very amusing Chef Watson cocktail recipes. Lots of savory concepts like putting chicken or meat into a drink.
    - yellowapple 5y ago
      I mean, that's all the rage for Bloody Mary recipes these days, so maybe Chef Watson was onto something.
    - pridkett 5y ago
      I worked on Chef Watson and was part of the team at SXSW. One of the most amusing parts was how much it loved bacon. This was because bacon could be sweet, savory, salty, and fatty - it all depended on how you cooked it. A big part of the way that Chef Watson created recipes was by connecting flavors together. There was a while when it didn’t record why it had included an ingredient - so bacon would be brought originally because it can be sweet, but then it would immediately bridge to the fatty flavor. Fun times indeed.
0898 5y ago
Watson was sold as being able to spit out answers without you having to think of the question. Could somebody more familiar with its capability reveal whether that was at all true?
1024core 5y ago
Watson was a big PR machine wrapped around a little kernel of AI/ML.
haltingproblem 5y ago
Often I see projects like Watson, Libra, Wave... which makes a very insistent voice say, the chance of this being real is really really small. This is completely anti-thetical to agile. What is the chance that this makes it through the gauntlet of product-market fit in-spite of the massive marketing dollars behind it and actually becomes a useful thriving product? I wish there was some way to short individual product or initiatives at tech companies. Perhaps it could create a feedback loop of sorts and actually be useful rather than just being a ego-validation mechanism for the shorters.
ChuckMcM 5y ago
Such a sad story and so unnecessary. IBM acquired Blekko in 2015 during 'peak Watson' and I was fascinated to peek behind the curtains as it were. What I found was both inspiring and terrifying. There were so many great people who had tremendous insights into applications of machine learning, neural networks, and generalized knowledge engineering as a service. It reminded me in some ways of PARC in the 80's. And like PARC, this effort was in the service to an institution that fundamentally didn't understand the ideas of ubiquitous networked compute that backed the web, much less the value proposition of this core technology. While I didn't walk the "hallowed halls of executive row", the ripples and changes that emanated from there told of a company desperate to stay relevant being managed by executives who didn't understand the environment but were desperate to stay employed. And for me, nothing is more sad than seeing a 20 - 30 year veteran of a company, sabotage its future to hold on their current job for one more year. One of my roles at the various companies where I have worked has been "change agent." Getting the company's head around fundamental change that will keep them from getting in their own way down the road. Critical to any change effort it is essential to help people see their role, and more importantly where they add value, in the post change universe so that they won't fight the change with all their efforts. IBM was being driven at that time in a very top-down sort of approach. Edicts like "This year you will all adapt an agile methodology." Which on their own make no sense at all to the folks lower down the chain. Sort of like saying "Everyone will only wear white pinstriped suits to work from now on." Everyone then incurs an expense of getting a bunch of new clothes, and they have no idea why they have to do this or how it helps the company. It was fascinating to listen to the responses of senior leaders to the "be agile" command. Almost all of them simply discussed how to take what they were already doing, and report them in a "agile" way, so that they could check the box. That isn't change leadership, that is simply injecting noise into the system and reducing efficiency. Now it may sound like I think they were all idiots, but I do not. I recognize the challenge of being a senior leader at a company in an industry that they once led and are now trailing. The board of directors might exhort you "go faster, get better, catch up" with no actionable guidance whatsoever. And the strategies that such companies use to recapture some relevance are not unique, buying the "hot new company" and trying to inject their momentum into your own. But it isn't as simple as making the CEO of "hot startup" an EVP in charge of "doing great things, but using the existing staff." Because the existing staff will push back on all the things the newly minted EVP is trying to change because, in part, they don't see what their role and value will be in the changed company. And if you have no role or value, you get RA'd[1]. A good friend of mine used to call them "Corporate Antibodies" and that was a really good analogy. Whenever change was in the air they would activate and work to shut it down. Which is why I spent quite a bit of time learning ways to introduce changes without triggering the corporate immune system. If you do it well, you get no credit at all for the change it just seems like everyone sort of decided that this was the right direction and changed course. So it is a sad moment for me to see the wonderful work of the engineers and scientists that brought many amazing technologies to market being treated as a humiliating failure on the part of a former giant in the computer industry. [1] Different companies use different euphemisms for laying people off, Sun use to call them "Job Relocations", Google called them "Group alignments", and IBM calls them "Resource Actions" (you know just balancing some resources by moving some numbers around on a ledger.)
8bitsrule 5y ago
Too bad HN doesn't have a special symbol for subscription-only articles. Seems like I run into more every day.
fallingfrog 5y ago
Watson is just a statistical guesser, as far as I can tell.
grappler 5y ago
The team of developers I was on around 2014-2015 was asked to do some user experience testing sessions of a mobile app that was part of our company's partnership with IBM, which was using Watson to answer users' healthcare questions with a chat interface. In short, we were not impressed, and basically said so in our feedback. Granted, that's just a few data points, and it was internal. But besides that, the overall vibe I got from the very businessy, very not-engineer management behind the effort was that Watson was brilliant, as demonstrated on Jeopardy, and the main stuff left to do was some plumbing to connect our stuff to some of that Watson brilliance, and of course the business details of the partnership between the companies. Glad I got out of there.
vijucat 5y ago
Man, I was so excited by that Jeopardy win. I fired up my Eclipse Prolog and went through a few example from "A Gentle Guide to Constraint Logic Programming via ECLiPSe", http://www.anclp.pl/ http://www.anclp.pl/, and Bratko. It would have been such a win for Prolog if IBM Watson did well. See https://www.cs.nmsu.edu/ALP/2011/03/natural-language-processing-with-prolog-in-the-ibm-watson-system/ https://www.cs.nmsu.edu/ALP/2011/03/natural-language-process... for more context (Of course, that's just a sub-system I'm focusing on; there's a lot more to Watson than parsing).
faangiq 5y ago
Watson was always an obvious sham designed to generate some good TV ads. Anyone who didn’t see this deserved to get fleeced.
quintes 5y ago
Can’t read the full article.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
drunkenmagician 5y ago
I worked on a project 4 years ago using some of Watson's cloud services (Its more a brand than a product now). Worked ok for us, certainly on par or better than Google / Microsoft's offerings at the time. We actually had contact with some of the original Watson team, that had some interesting insights / details - needless to say, much of Watson is 'brand marketing' and not really hard AI science ... bit like every other 'AI' product in the market right now I guess - Disclaimer: I work for a cloud software company building AI products ... ;)
MR4D 5y ago
I see tons of comments on how IBM sucks. Fair enough - they do. However, consider that IBM is selling off its AI crown jewel to “* refocus its business on cloud computing and AI services*.” So an IBM that does something like that knows it has a problem and is killing off the parts it doesn't need, so it can simplify and improve focus. To me, this is a good indication that the new IBM will be quite different from the recent IBM, and more like the old IBM (pre 1980’s).
- sc68cal 5y ago
  IBM can't do cloud. https://www.protocol.com/enterprise/ibm-lost-public-cloud https://www.protocol.com/enterprise/ibm-lost-public-cloud Source: I was part of "GC" in that article.
- NikolaeVarius 5y ago
  I dont think I've met a single person who has used IBM cloud that has anything at all not despicable to say about IBM cloud.
killjoywashere 5y ago
Good riddance. The number of smart people who expected me to comment intelligently on Watson’s plumbing in the before-times was disturbing. Trying to be very polite when saying “I have no idea what Watson does, and I’m not sure you or the person you talked to does either” is ... not my strong suit.
ai_ja_nai 5y ago
Happy to hear about it. It was an intolerable show of hubris, marketing babble and general pretentiousness.
dreamcompiler 5y ago
I expect Ken Jennings is experiencing some schadenfreude about now.
waffle_maniac 5y ago
https://www.cnbc.com/2017/05/08/buffett-says-ibms-watson-will-have-greatest-value-when-it-replaces-human-labor.html https://www.cnbc.com/2017/05/08/buffett-says-ibms-watson-wil... Imagine missing all the successful tech companies and then investing in this!
zeroesandones 5y ago
sad, I was really excited about the tech when I first heard it

688 points by alexmorley 5y ago

The bigger and more interesting question for me right now is who’s going to be this decade’s IBM? I want to say Amazon.

Watson Health and Watson are not synonymous. Who gets to use the name, idk, but there are a hundred Watsony things in consulting.

civilized 5y ago

Who could have seen it coming? IBM created a machine that could win at Jeopardy, not a universal expert or problem solver. Say what you want about Google, but they didn't claim to solve any practical problems by creating AlphaZero.

ProAm 5y ago
Google is the next IBM.
- derwiki 5y ago
  60 years of prosperity before the wheels start coming off? Probably
- spookthesunset 5y ago
  I don’t know. Does google do consulting? IBM is its own category of tech company really… Oracle would fit the bill better.
  - ProAm 5y ago
    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.
nwsm 5y ago
Meanwhile Google is unfolding Google Health.
- jonas21 5y ago
  Not sure what you mean by "unfolding". But, unlike Watson, Google Health seems to be building tools that may be useful for healthcare providers rather than just marketing hype. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=71DVIWZnOho https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=71DVIWZnOho
zwischenzug 5y ago
Tbf IBM didn't either when deep blue beat kasparov

mromanuk 5y ago

There should be a way to bet (short) against “projects” or products, not the whole company. When they hyped about Watson Health, I “knew” it will fail.

cuteboy19 5y ago
Sometimes companies use their failed or loss making products to help promote their successful products. YouTube is a prime example
- frosted-flakes 5y ago
  What failed/loss-making products is Google using to promote YouTube?
  - donkarma 5y ago
    you think YouTube is profitable?
    - colinmhayes 5y ago
      Yes, I think youtube is making billions of dollars a year. Youtube's revenue was $25 billion last year. It's a mature product. You don't think it's making money?
      - mardifoufs 5y ago
        Google still doesn't release the profit figures for youtube, only revenue. Even the revenue figure was a secret until 2--3 years ago, so it was probably not that high. If youtube was very profitable, I'm not sure why Google would hide it in its earnings since they almost always try to show how they aren't exclusively dependent on their search ad business. I'm not saying youtube does not make any profit at this point, but if it wasn't tiny there's no reason for them not to talk about it.
        5y ago

user3939382 5y ago

I 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.

gexla 5y ago
So, they invented a Mechanical Turk?
- ta988 5y ago
  One that lost games yes.
idontwantthis 5y ago
Like in Neal Stephenson's Diamond Age with the on-demand voice actors. I wonder if that was a lack of imagination about what AI will become, or if it was prescience that AI will turn out to be cost ineffective or not capable for most uses.
pram 5y ago
Sounds like what happened at Theranos! I read the analysis Watson was generating was ultimately just ignored by doctors because it came to inaccurate conclusions, so that makes sense.
absoluteharam 5y ago
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.
- 5y ago

czbond 5y ago

What was the deal with this? Was it that the internal management team just mis-managed the product they had?

max_ 5y ago
On a long enough time horizon, everyone's survival rate goes to zero. [0]: [Why Cities Keep on Growing, Corporations Always Die, and Life Gets Faster] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jOnWowd-7HQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jOnWowd-7HQ
lotsofpulp 5y ago
It was just IBM throwing stuff at the wall to try and keep up with big tech companies. They have been in decline for a long time, and I assume this marketing stunt did not fool anyone actually involved in the businesses of healthcare or tech.
DebtDeflation 5y ago
It wasn't a product. It was a business unit created by the acquisition of (at least) 4 separate companies that had wildly disparate products, data sets, and consulting teams. The only thing they had in common was the focus on healthcare (and even that could mean anything vaguely related to providers, payers, or life sciences). "Watson" in general evolved into little more than a branding that was applied to anything remotely related to AI, analytics, or data management.
- fault1 5y ago
  It kind of sounds like a cautionary tale for other tech companies wading into the health space or medicine (e.g, calico, deepmind).

raverbashing 5y ago

"billed as a revolution in medicine" by whom? IBM's marketing department? Anything "Watson" (together with 95% of that company - optimistically) is marred too deep in bureaucracy and yes men to do anything productive and innovative.

RotaryTelephone 5y ago
Heh, imagine a comma "and yes, men, to do anything productive"
- m2f2 5y ago
  Better still, no comma and no space.

ezconnect 5y ago

daniel-thompson 5y ago

This is kind of funny to see after reading the Tech Review's piece on Watson Health from 4 years ago (https://www.technologyreview.com/2017/06/27/4462/a-reality-check-for-ibms-ai-ambitions/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2017/06/27/4462/a-reality-c...). They were wrong on the outcome but right on the diagnosis - that the marketing got way ahead of the engineering.

sys_64738 5y ago

It might be successful if not lumbered with a dinosaur such as the IBM tag around its neck. Nobody I know looks to IBM for anything nowadays.

saxonww 5y ago

I 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 make astounding amounts of money while leaning heavily on their staff to actually handle patients and keep the business running. I thought it could help drugs get a little cheaper too, because there wouldn't be any point in the pharma companies sending out salespeople to do lunch seminars to convince the GPs to prescribe this or that drug (this still happens). Maybe this will still happen, but it doesn't seem imminent anymore.

Aeolun 5y ago
> GPs often make astounding amounts of money while leaning heavily on their staff to actually handle patients and keep the business running I’ve seen this in Japan (ish), but in the Netherlands it’s definitely the GP’s doing most of the job. The assistant just does bookings and waves me in when it’s my turn.
hiptobecubic 5y ago
I thought we'd have banned Dr lobbying by now, even without a technological revolution.
- bigbillheck 5y ago
  We haven't banned other kinds of lobbying, why would doctors be different?
- jac241 5y ago
  I thought we’d have banned software engineer lobbying by now, look how much harm they’re causing - https://www.healthline.com/health-news/social-media-use-increases-depression-and-loneliness https://www.healthline.com/health-news/social-media-use-incr...
- robotresearcher 5y ago

boboche 5y ago

IBM 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.

shane_b 5y ago
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.
- beckingz 5y ago
  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.
  - shane_b 5y ago
    I believe it. There’s value in shared systems but not necessarily a special data store.
- lotsofpulp 5y ago
  Based on their lack of competitive pay, I assume IBM does or will end up competing with TCS, Cognizant, Infosys, etc.
- sadwings 5y ago
  > one of the only if not the only enterprise "permissioned" blockchain projects Not quite, check out Corda's R3 project - it's already being widely used in enterprise and projects are being built on top of it.
  - shane_b 5y ago

funstuff007 5y ago

What 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-2016-12 https://www.businessinsider.com/ibm-watson-office-tour-2016-...

draw_down 5y ago

seibelj 5y ago

A friend of mine wanted to show off his Tesla by making it come to the front of the restaurant from where he parked it. Like he hit a button and it was to drive up. It got stuck somehow and was diagonal in the row. He was like “ehh sometimes it doesn’t work.” AI in general is very over stated. When it works it’s great, when it doesn’t (which is often) then you lose all trust in it.

hiptobecubic 5y ago
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?
- deltaonefour 5y ago
  Except all self driving AI companies have failed to achieve reliable AI. Every single one. So it says something about AI more than companies.
  - hiptobecubic 5y ago
    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!"
    - deltaonefour 5y ago
      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.

rvense 5y ago

The technology they sent on Jeopard answered a question, I think, that was looking for the name of a specific king of Egypt with "What are trousers?". Seems pretty obvious that anything that would do that is not human-like intelligence, and probably the search results should be taken with a handful of salt even if they stuck some impressive natural language generation after it.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
newsbinator 5y ago
I'm okay with this: humans likely make hilariously bad guesses about things that are obvious and easily accessible to machines, and therefore the reverse is also true. Guessing "what are trousers" for king of Egypt isn't in itself an indicator the whole Watson system is flawed. Although you're right: it's an indicator the intelligence is non human-like. Just like, from Watson's perspective, a human named John making hilariously bad guesses related to coin flips isn't in itself an indicator that John isn't intelligent either. Just that there are some categories of knowledge or application of that knowledge that some systems are bad at handling.
- akira2501 5y ago
  Humans understand the value of saying "I don't know" then their internally measured probability of accuracy is very low. AIs don't seem to have that "gate," and to a human, it does make them appear to be very 'foolish' machines.
  - ravi-delia 5y ago
    That's really a choice. I mean most machine learning models wind up outputting a confidence distribution over possible outputs, so it's up to the user to decide how to extract an answer from that. They can and do have low confidence when they aren't sure.
  - oneoff786 5y ago

sklargh 5y ago

Turns out advertising at every tennis major can't make you a leader in analytics, ML and basic managed services.

mnd999 5y ago
They’re good at scoreboards though. Although the Wimbledon one did break down during Isner vs Mahut.
telxosser 5y ago
What data was it using again? The blood panel your doctor orders every one to two years? Medical diagnosis is a trivial problem for machine learning to beat humans. Humans are terrible at this. The problem is there is not even the concept of high frequency medical data. Imagine machine learning in quant stock trading with samples once a year. Of course it isn't going to work. The problem is all in the externalities. Doctors don't want AI. They can see the automation path and their bank account change down the line quite clearly. Not to mention most doctors don't know anything about data science so how can you have any faith in the algorithm prediction? No one wants to be the test case and then get a law suit. "I was just following what the computer said was correct". Wrong answer, pay up. The real irony to me is in a 100 years people look at the current medical system as complete quakery. Literally have everything right now to build medical super intelligence but stuck with the human doctors doing the exact same things from 50 years ago.
- rurp 5y ago
  I agree with this so strongly. The medical gatekeeping is absolutely absurd. I can't remember the last time I learned something from a doctor that I hadn't already learned myself with a quick online search. For every visit in the past decade or longer they either told me what I already knew or we were both stumped. If drives me crazy that I can't make my own decisions about my own health, even for trivial cases. I've spent countless hours and dollars going to pointless doctor visits just to get a routine refill. Literally the conversation at most of these visits is as simple as me telling the doc that everything is fine with $medA, lets just keep it the same; followed by the doctor saying sure and writing me a new script. Such a massive inefficient waste of time.

hayesall 5y ago

Article is paywalled, but this story has evolved over the last few weeks: - 2022-01-05: "Scoop: IBM tries to sell Watson Health again" https://www.axios.com/ibm-tries-to-sell-watson-health-again-82f691a4-ab81-4b2b-a5bb-13a7556c8ef1.html https://www.axios.com/ibm-tries-to-sell-watson-health-again-... - 2022-01-07: "IBM reportedly shopping Watson Health just as healthcare gets hot" https://techcrunch.com/2022/01/07/ibm-reportedly-shopping-watson-health-just-as-healthcare-gets-hot/ https://techcrunch.com/2022/01/07/ibm-reportedly-shopping-wa... A lot of the hope seemed to be in document summarization from the latest medical literature, plus integrating patient data from electronic medical records. The autopsy of this could be interesting. Some of the critiques against using electronic health records previously was that many of them were designed for medical billing (I don't have a good link, but Eric Topol's "Deep Medicine" has some notes on this problem https://www.basicbooks.com/titles/eric-topol-md/deep-medicine/9781541644649/ https://www.basicbooks.com/titles/eric-topol-md/deep-medicin...).

cube00 5y ago

It will be interesting to see if self driving cars and the way they've been rushed to market with the same brute force marketing will meet a similar fate.

cnlwsu 5y ago
Self driving cars are not made by IBM. I wouldn’t consider their utter failure at everything they touch to be a sign that that AI field failed.
- echopurity 5y ago
- jjcon 5y ago
  Agreed, AI is just like any software. There are good, bad, scammy and brilliant examples of it. With AI somehow though people like to use one bad example as a referendum on everything. I think I understand why (because AI as a term is overloaded by marketing teams), but the inclination is to paint with a broad brush is still inaccurate here.
- laurent92 5y ago
  Yes. The IBM Rationale suite failed even though it wasn’t AI. It’s the IBM way they commercialize things by going to golf with execs which is the problem.
xnx 5y ago
Google started its self driving project 13 years ago. It doesn't seem like they're rushing anything.
mnd999 5y ago
Self driving cars are just that, marketing. Tesla for all their hype have limited driver assist only and even Google who seem to have the most advanced offering only works in limited areas in good conditions and the dataset that drives it requires lots of maintenance. The general problem is too hard, and general practice has some of the same problems. Probably less adversarial data, but there’s still litigation to be had from confusing an AI GP. Or narcotics.

kumarvvr 5y ago

History will see our current decade of AI and only see over promises and under deliveries. I have decent amount of hope for AI, but corporate greed, hype by practitioners, a general explosion of various edTech companies hyping up the hype to drive online course sales and general excess of VC money is driving an embarrassing amount of AI failures. I am sure that any fad now and in the future, will have a similar cycle.

bpiche 5y ago
Nothing to be afraid of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_winter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_winter

JohnJamesRambo 5y ago

You can count on it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gartner_hype_cycle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gartner_hype_cycle

ramphastidae 5y ago

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.

nickysielicki 5y ago

I 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 blew their budget on marketing (remember Watson on Jeopardy?) The final straw for me was watching football with a techhy friend and a commercial for IBMs “hybrid cloud” came on. There’s some executive mulling over whether to “go to the cloud” or whether to go with on premises, and they have a eureka moment where they learn about IBM hybrid cloud and they go into a board meeting and save the day. We both just burst out laughing. IBM doesn’t make stuff anymore. That’s the core problem.

bastardoperator 5y ago
Easy. Governments, emerging countries, and heavy handed consulting. Once you're on their garbage it becomes near impossible to leave it.
300bps 5y ago
They’re a public company. Here’s how they make money: https://www.ibm.com/investor/att/pdf/IBM-2Q-Earnings-Press-Release.pdf https://www.ibm.com/investor/att/pdf/IBM-2Q-Earnings-Press-R...
- stefan_ 5y ago
  That's a joke. If you read that drivel prepared for the stock market, you would come away thinking IBM is the biggest Cloud operator in the world. In reality of course they have just rebranded all kind of cash flow streams as "cloud" - because they know "cloud" will make the stock go up whereas "mainframe" makes it go down.
  - rbanffy 5y ago
    They also provide mainframe-based Linux VMs for clients that require the encryption technology built into those machines. If you need to give certain assurances by law or contract, they may be a good option. Apart from that, if you need on-demand VMs for IBM i or AIX, they are one of your only options.

lumost 5y ago

Anecdotally, the main business value I've seen from ML/AI tech has been in cases where 1. A basic solution shipped and made a ton of money e.g. Ads, Search, recommendations etc. 2. It is financially feasible to have a dedicated team(s) make small incremental progress on these solutions. Even very small gains are beneficial. 3. The business perceives a threat if they fall behind in this area. The thing is that the gains on the basic solution (heuristics, off the shelf pre-trained CV model, open voice recognition) are pretty small, and if the threat of others making progress goes away - the inferred value of further investment will probably vanish as well. Other applications which put the AI in the driver's seat (sometimes literally) seem far from production - or if they do work, then they work reasonably well using an alternate approach from what you might expect.

transfire 5y ago

The only real business problem is they didn’t program Watson to do what the Healthcare industry actually wants — make more $$$$$. The last thing they want is a computer that can actually diagnose people and provide effective solutions.

tomrod 5y ago
> The last thing they want is a computer that can actually diagnose people and provide effective solutions. Intimately knowing the non-profit side of the healthcare system as well as the construction and operation of data science systems, I wholeheartedly disagree with your assertion and your conclusion as being a general takeaway.
- stillworks 5y ago
  Can you possibly provide some objective comments on why that comment may be incorrect ?
  - tomrod 5y ago
    Here is a submarine Wired article on what Watson promoters expected it to do -- which supports what the parent commenter thought, the focus being on "bottom-line": https://www.wired.com/insights/2015/02/what-can-watson-do-for-your-company/ https://www.wired.com/insights/2015/02/what-can-watson-do-fo... Here is insight into how non-profit and community health programs are funded: https://www.parklandhospital.com/financial-summary https://www.parklandhospital.com/financial-summary Here is a section of Healthcare new dedicated to AI/ML implementations and other related events: https://www.healthcareitnews.com/topics/artificial-intelligence https://www.healthcareitnews.com/topics/artificial-intellige... Here is CMS's directive for hospital price transparency: https://www.cms.gov/hospital-price-transparency https://www.cms.gov/hospital-price-transparency The parent comment assumed that everything in healthcare is profit-motive driven. However, there are large portions of the healthcare industry that are non-profit, that are transparent in their funding and their costs, and that are looking to implement AI to improve healthcare outcomes. Parkland Health and Hospital System, Harris Health System, University Health System are some that I am more familiar with that run with this (PHHS recently achieved HIMMS Level 7 certification, for example). These are social safety-net hospitals and healthcare systems -- they care for everyone regardless of ability to pay. They focus not only on emergency and inpatient care, but also ambulatory care, primary care, and even fund (at arm's length) community (non-profit) medicaid insurers. On a more subjective side, I've seen a lot of folks out to make a buck, but the non-profit healthcare side has been much more focused on patient outcomes.

pettycashstash2 5y ago

IBM has a large consulting business. They make a lot of money on Services.

nwsm 5y ago
That business was spun off into Kyndryl.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]

perardi 5y ago

I worked for one of the companies that IBM acquired to make this non-product. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-merge-healthcare-m-a-ibm/ibm-to-buy-merge-healthcare-in-1-billion-deal-idUSKCN0QB1ML20150806 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-merge-healthcare-m-a-ibm/... I have no idea what they got for the money they spent. Merge Healthcare was the most miserable work experience I have ever had. They had patents, I guess, but the actual technology was garbage. And the owner was…a piece of work, let's say that. https://www.npr.org/2018/12/12/675961765/tribune-tronc-and-beyond-a-slur-a-secret-payout-and-a-looming-sale https://www.npr.org/2018/12/12/675961765/tribune-tronc-and-b...

lvl100 5y ago
Healthcare IT is all garbage. It’s as if the people who invested in the space specifically did not want any of the inefficiencies to go away.
- goodluckchuck 5y ago
  The inefficiencies are where all the money is made. After all, patients don’t pay and they certainly don’t pay for results. Patients may pay for insurance, and buy the right to not worry. Insurance delivers peace of mind by with appointments, papers, and pills. Look at all the bureaucracy and money, it must be fancy and effective. In the course of producing these papers are human doctors, nurses, coders, etc. They sometimes feel a sense of human decency and help people pro bono.
jackcosgrove 5y ago
> Merge Healthcare was the most miserable work experience I have ever had. Was it the orange ties?
- perardi 5y ago
  Ha, in a way. Because they were indicative of Ferro’s “leadership”: flashy branding gimmicks, with nothing to back them up. Like when he bought an orange Tesla roadster to bring to trade shows. He’d just pop an orange car in the middle of the booth. What’s that got to do with health care? I dunno. (And this was all a while ago, but this job just always stuck in my craw, because it made “Silicon Valley” feel like an understated documentary and not a parody.)

throwawayay02 5y ago

To the surprise of no one who ever paid attention.

anm89 5y ago

I don't know if I'm the only one, but I always felt like Watson was roleplaying being a relevant tech company. Something about the way they marketed it just seemed like it was a big PR campaign with no meat behind it. I always had a suspicion that most people agreed but was never really sure.

bilekas 5y ago

Is it possible to get a non paid link ?

tomrod 5y ago

This is wholly unsurprising. IBM's big play was to integrate data science methods into the workflow. But they approached it from a "we will replace your labor costs" versus "we will augment your labor costs." Besides their AI models being fairly poor in quality, technology doesn't replace people very well where extrapolation is needed. So the quality of service Watson brought was significantly lower than what these businesses offered prior to adoption. So keeping Watson became an exercise in how well the business understands sunk costs and switching costs.

lvl100 5y ago
This so much. They basically let Snowflake (among others) eat their lunch. Back in 2015, IBM actually had a good chance but leadership just dropped the ball.

jollybean 5y ago

John Kelly on Charlie Rose, 2016 worth a gander [1] [1] https://charlierose.com/videos/29530 https://charlierose.com/videos/29530

achow 5y ago

Non-Paywalled https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/21/business/ibm-watson-health.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/21/business/ibm-watson-healt... https://archive.fo/uFNnJ https://archive.fo/uFNnJ The business is being sold for an undisclosed price to Francisco Partners, a private investment firm.. Watson Health was set up as a separate business in 2015. IBM then spent more than $4 billion to acquire companies with medical data, billing records and diagnostic images on hundreds of millions of patients.

cantrememberpw8 5y ago

I'm excited by this. I recently left Red Hat for greener pastures. From where I sat, IBM was slowly turning toward wisdom again, having been run aground by its previous few CEOs. I was skeptical when IBM bought Red Hat, but after several years of not screwing it up, I'm pretty hopeful. Now, Krishna is working on streamlining the business and making the rest of IBM more like Red Hat. Splitting off the low performing Kyndryl, and selling Watson, are part of this by cutting obsolete sectors; focusing on getting Red Hat the resources it needs to rapidly accelerate, and on building the talent pool by hiring more junior engineers, are the positive changes working to turn IBM back into a powerhouse.

kumarvvr 5y ago
Curious, what does RedHat actually do ?
- leokennis 5y ago
  They make sure enterprises can run Linux that doesn’t “suddenly” (read: with less than 2-3 years notice) break their critical workflows because some component loses support or some dependency reaches EOL - they do this by extended maintenance, backporting (security) patches to old versions, providing tailored support etc. This is very valuable to enterprises and so they pay a lot for it. For example, you can still run Red Hat 6 safely and securely until 2024; by that point Red Hat 8 will have been out for 5 years already.
  - staz 5y ago
    To save you a web search : Red Hat 6 was relased 6 November 2010. Roughly 1 year after Window 7, which ended support 2 weeks ago.
    - KindOne 5y ago
      Windows 7 went EOL in on Jan 14, 2020. Are you talking about the Extended Security Update? That ends Jan 10, 2023. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/lifecycle/products/windows-7 https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/lifecycle/products/windows-...

captainmuon 5y ago

I think "Watson" was never a thing (a technology or a product). Rather it was a marketing term. "Watson" meant any solution or research project that was developed by IBM and had remotely to do with AI. A bit like "Active*" or "NET" back in the day for Microsoft.

Forge36 5y ago
Capitalize on the "machine learning" hype with a unique name sold as a developed product?

tekstar 5y ago

I worked for a large e-commerce company. I wanted to investigate putting all our support data into Watson and see what sort of recommendations it could provide, maybe a sort of auto-suggestion to help our customers. Three really funny points stand out from the experience: 1) To apply for Watson access you needed to show C-level approval, so our CEO put his name and phone number on the application (trying Watson was somewhat his idea). A few months later, an IBM marketing team called HIS CELL and asked for ME. Imagine how it felt to have the CEO walk up to me, deadpan hand me his personal iphone and say "It's for you.".. 2) They told me they'd help me with the support data idea, and every meeting we set up they tried to pitch "what if we put Watson on all of your customer's storefronts, we could add a 'powered by watson' banner on every page, and you give us a cut of GMV?". I pivoted them to our plugin framework and told them to build it themselves. 3) To demo the technology, the first step was to buy a $250k server from IBM. To demo it. Big LOLs all around, never trust big blue.

WrtCdEvrydy 5y ago
> an IBM marketing team called HIS CELL and asked for ME. What the fuck is this? A name/email for your company when trying something out is so that you can keep track of any support requests we need, not for you to sell shit to me.
- throwaheyy 5y ago
  Yeah, the whole culture there (and other places like Oracle) is all about implanting mindshare at the decision-maker level and driving unilateral adoption from the top down. Pursuing such an approach is highly revealing because if the technology actually worked, that approach would not be necessary. Once they’re “in” at the decision-maker level, they can continue to milk the organisation with long-duration support and consulting contracts, feeding parasitically and gradually becoming more and more entangled. One spectacular example, 7M budget but in actuality, 1.2B down the drain and nothing to show for it https://blog.beyondsoftware.com/the-queensland-health-payroll-fiasco https://blog.beyondsoftware.com/the-queensland-health-payrol...
  - 5y ago

umangkeshri 5y ago

back in 2016 I joined my first company as Fresher and was excited to work in the use case of Ml and was given my first project for making chat bots using IBM Watson Conversation :P I think that is the worst project i have done in my life till now.

lettergram 5y ago

There were many, myself included, who called Watson vaporware since day one. Glad to see it go. It was almost as bad as Theanos, frankly.

sputr 5y ago

>that GPs in particular would be replaced by a lower-cost Watson descendant Everybody is trying to replace GPs (and even specialists) with AI. But I've experienced a massive issue in healthcare that does not need an AI, just a good database. I was prescribed intensive imunorepresive therapy... and they forgot to put me on preventative antibiotics. If there was a very simple IF on my prescription (if Medrol > 16mg && TimeOnMedrol > 3 months { checkIfOnAntibiotics() } ) I would not have almost died with a PCP pneumonia. Engineers always focus on the interesting technical innovation. But we have so much low-hanging fruit still to do, that just needs to use our existing technical abilities in really, really boring ways.

sedachv 5y ago
> If there was a very simple IF on my prescription This was supposed to be solved by rule-based/expert systems in the 1980s AI bubble.
- sputr 5y ago
  The "was supposed" is the point of my comment. It wasn't. Yeah, there are a lot of systems like these who do some part of this, but it's far, FAR from a solved issue.

wslh 5y ago

I am aware that a friend's very small company related to NLP/NLU[1] beat IBM in a sale because the algorithms worked better than the Watson ones what seems incredible in two things: beating them at sales and technologically. [1] https://natural.do/en/ https://natural.do/en/

nickdothutton 5y ago

Watson is a great example of what happens when your marketing is better than your product, or to be more accurate technology toolkit. IBM will probably send RH the same way as they sent Softlayer.

whoopdedo 5y ago

The grand demonstration of Watson playing Jeopardy ended with the question to an answer about U.S. Cities being "What is Toronto?"

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

crispyambulance 5y ago

I wonder where the search engine Blekko ended up? It was acquired by IBM for use in Watson back in 2015. Blekko was an interesting attempt at addressing search engine problems using a thing called "slashtags" to better categorize searches.

hn_throwaway_99 5y ago

Can we post a non-paywalled version of this news? TechCrunch has a better version of this IMO: https://techcrunch.com/2022/01/21/francisco-partners-scoops-up-remains-of-ibms-watson-health-unit/ https://techcrunch.com/2022/01/21/francisco-partners-scoops-...

trollied 5y ago

They are a nightmare. I was part of a huge project to replace a large part of a telecom operators infrastructure. IBM global services ran the operators IT outsourced. The project failed after a year because of them. It was the 3rd such project to fail. The company in question couldn’t bring themselves to realise it had been their outsourced operators fault once again. Even though they had again lost the bid to do said work. PwC/Accenture were worse. Hire arts graduates because they got a degree from a good university, chuck them on a 2 month coding/consulting course. Happy days $$$

ogogmad 5y ago
I once went to a job interview at Accenture. I remember the recruiter told me they only considered me because I went to a prestigious university. When I got there, they practically IQ tested me, were rude to me, and never contacted me again even after they said they would. The job was to write GUIs in C#. Listen up Accenture, I will drink expensive champagne when you go bust, or get bought.
- alfiedotwtf 5y ago
  > drink expensive champagne when you go bust You'll have to get in line
- 7thaccount 5y ago
  Not getting contacted again was probably a blessing in disguise. They don't really do much, but kind of act like PMs, but aren't very effective as they don't know the business very well. I think they're generally only used when a company temporarily needs like 20 warm bodies to assist with a large project.
  - curiousllama 5y ago
    You’re right, but off by a few orders of magnitude. Think “need 200, get 2000” warm bodies

sdenton4 5y ago

The American healthcare system is littered with the dead bodies of both startups and large tech companies...

JCM9 5y ago

Watson was mostly data science powered consulting pretending to have/be a product. They played heavily on the Jeopardy thing from a marking standpoint but what they were actually trying to sell was a hot mess. I do consider this a good milestone in getting past the latest “AI” hype cycle and focusing on what actually works in that space. Sat through too many meetings with non-technical execs saying “what if we apply Watson here?”. The likes of McKinsey were pushing this stuff hard in what they were whispering into executives ears.

pb060 5y ago

Wish they had resumed IBM Chef Watson, it was completely useless and the exotic ingredients made the recipes impossible to prepare, but for a while it was my favorite procrastination activity

morpheuskafka 5y ago

As someone doing a CS degree now, I seem to be the only one who doesn't want to have anything on my resume to do with "AI", blockchain, ML, NFT, chatbots, etc... all I see is overhyped product after product, one-size-fits all solutions that frustrate customers and create problems for humans to clean up, hugely valued companies that have very little real improvement over conventional technology, etc. An "AI chatbot" is far inferior to a real user interface. A real user interface allows discoverability (looking through menus to notice functions that may be useful later), experimentation, and puts the user in control of the program. For example, my bank apparently only supports viewing the reason for card declines through the chatbot--something I never knew, because I took the time to go through the menus when I first got the app and learn what functions existed.

opportune 5y ago
If you want to do something less buzzwordy with lots of real-life applications, look into distributed systems. Try running an Apache big data project yourself and write some programs/queries for it, try making a change to the project to do something cool. My suggestion to check out an Apache big data project is just that it gives you a good place to learn, not so you can be a "hadoop specialist" or anything like that. There is way more real world usage of the distributed systems concepts and skills you'd learn there (especially in large tech companies) than any other flavor of the month. While ML is also commonly used in the industry, the signal:noise is really bad, because a lot of its uses are superfluous buzzword-driven development. However, many many companies rely on distributed systems to be able to operate at scale.
- rlayton2 5y ago
  Absolutely. I often joke that my work as a data scientist is mostly creating bar graphs for people. The actual analysis is often reasonably simple, its the aggregating of the data that is hard (its messy, its not all in the one spot and there is lots of it). So start with querying your big data to say what the top three event types are. Then slowly crank up the analysis complexity, but not too much. The data engineering has lots of scope for real solid and obvious applications.
- 5y ago

avrionov 5y ago

Many people shame the startups for fake it until you make it, but IBM with Watson and Watson Health did exactly that for years and 'serious' analysts were predicting how their healthcare AI efforts will increase their revenue. Compare their results with Tesla.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

amelius 5y ago

Did they sell their contracts for collecting patient data as well?

ogogmad 5y ago

What's the chances that we'll have robotic domestic servants before 2032? With AlphaZero, AlphaFold and sort-of OK machine translation, I think it's 50:50, no?

Barrin92 5y ago
as in physical android ones? More like 2:98. I'd be very astonished if we see a robot plumber by 2050.
- ogogmad 5y ago
  Plumbing seems harder than loading and unloading a dish washer. Or doing laundry.
BlueTemplar 5y ago
But none of this matters that much for the hardest part : the robotics of it. You probably need to instead follow what Boston Dynamics is up to...

formeribmer 5y ago

I worked at IBM Watson as one of the early engineers when they first started commercializing the product. It was a fucking joke - Ginni Rometty would go up on stage and said that Watson can help diagnose cancer from CT scans and we would just look at each other and be like "Dude, Watson is just a glorified Lucene index, wtf is she talking about." They started selling Watson as the end-all for everything from cancer diagnosis to customer service chat - they even had a stupid Watson Chef thing at SXSW one year - but none of that used the original Watson codebase - it was all built from the ground up and lots of it was just simple logistic regression

osipov 5y ago
dllthomas 5y ago
> they even had a stupid Watson chef thing at SXSW one year I loved Chef Watson, am sad that it's gone, and would pay a small amount for renewed access. It wasn't "smart", and its recommendations needed to be tempered with human understanding, but I wound up with some great recipes that I wouldn't have thought of otherwise. I think the best was goat milk mac & cheese with radishes and red miso. The funniest was when it told me to remove the connective tissue from tofu.
- mNovak 5y ago
  I remember reading some very amusing Chef Watson cocktail recipes. Lots of savory concepts like putting chicken or meat into a drink.
  - yellowapple 5y ago
    I mean, that's all the rage for Bloody Mary recipes these days, so maybe Chef Watson was onto something.
  - pridkett 5y ago
    I worked on Chef Watson and was part of the team at SXSW. One of the most amusing parts was how much it loved bacon. This was because bacon could be sweet, savory, salty, and fatty - it all depended on how you cooked it. A big part of the way that Chef Watson created recipes was by connecting flavors together. There was a while when it didn’t record why it had included an ingredient - so bacon would be brought originally because it can be sweet, but then it would immediately bridge to the fatty flavor. Fun times indeed.

0898 5y ago

Watson was sold as being able to spit out answers without you having to think of the question. Could somebody more familiar with its capability reveal whether that was at all true?

1024core 5y ago

Watson was a big PR machine wrapped around a little kernel of AI/ML.

haltingproblem 5y ago

Often I see projects like Watson, Libra, Wave... which makes a very insistent voice say, the chance of this being real is really really small. This is completely anti-thetical to agile. What is the chance that this makes it through the gauntlet of product-market fit in-spite of the massive marketing dollars behind it and actually becomes a useful thriving product? I wish there was some way to short individual product or initiatives at tech companies. Perhaps it could create a feedback loop of sorts and actually be useful rather than just being a ego-validation mechanism for the shorters.

ChuckMcM 5y ago

Such a sad story and so unnecessary. IBM acquired Blekko in 2015 during 'peak Watson' and I was fascinated to peek behind the curtains as it were. What I found was both inspiring and terrifying. There were so many great people who had tremendous insights into applications of machine learning, neural networks, and generalized knowledge engineering as a service. It reminded me in some ways of PARC in the 80's. And like PARC, this effort was in the service to an institution that fundamentally didn't understand the ideas of ubiquitous networked compute that backed the web, much less the value proposition of this core technology. While I didn't walk the "hallowed halls of executive row", the ripples and changes that emanated from there told of a company desperate to stay relevant being managed by executives who didn't understand the environment but were desperate to stay employed. And for me, nothing is more sad than seeing a 20 - 30 year veteran of a company, sabotage its future to hold on their current job for one more year. One of my roles at the various companies where I have worked has been "change agent." Getting the company's head around fundamental change that will keep them from getting in their own way down the road. Critical to any change effort it is essential to help people see their role, and more importantly where they add value, in the post change universe so that they won't fight the change with all their efforts. IBM was being driven at that time in a very top-down sort of approach. Edicts like "This year you will all adapt an agile methodology." Which on their own make no sense at all to the folks lower down the chain. Sort of like saying "Everyone will only wear white pinstriped suits to work from now on." Everyone then incurs an expense of getting a bunch of new clothes, and they have no idea why they have to do this or how it helps the company. It was fascinating to listen to the responses of senior leaders to the "be agile" command. Almost all of them simply discussed how to take what they were already doing, and report them in a "agile" way, so that they could check the box. That isn't change leadership, that is simply injecting noise into the system and reducing efficiency. Now it may sound like I think they were all idiots, but I do not. I recognize the challenge of being a senior leader at a company in an industry that they once led and are now trailing. The board of directors might exhort you "go faster, get better, catch up" with no actionable guidance whatsoever. And the strategies that such companies use to recapture some relevance are not unique, buying the "hot new company" and trying to inject their momentum into your own. But it isn't as simple as making the CEO of "hot startup" an EVP in charge of "doing great things, but using the existing staff." Because the existing staff will push back on all the things the newly minted EVP is trying to change because, in part, they don't see what their role and value will be in the changed company. And if you have no role or value, you get RA'd[1]. A good friend of mine used to call them "Corporate Antibodies" and that was a really good analogy. Whenever change was in the air they would activate and work to shut it down. Which is why I spent quite a bit of time learning ways to introduce changes without triggering the corporate immune system. If you do it well, you get no credit at all for the change it just seems like everyone sort of decided that this was the right direction and changed course. So it is a sad moment for me to see the wonderful work of the engineers and scientists that brought many amazing technologies to market being treated as a humiliating failure on the part of a former giant in the computer industry. [1] Different companies use different euphemisms for laying people off, Sun use to call them "Job Relocations", Google called them "Group alignments", and IBM calls them "Resource Actions" (you know just balancing some resources by moving some numbers around on a ledger.)

8bitsrule 5y ago

Too bad HN doesn't have a special symbol for subscription-only articles. Seems like I run into more every day.

fallingfrog 5y ago

Watson is just a statistical guesser, as far as I can tell.

grappler 5y ago

The team of developers I was on around 2014-2015 was asked to do some user experience testing sessions of a mobile app that was part of our company's partnership with IBM, which was using Watson to answer users' healthcare questions with a chat interface. In short, we were not impressed, and basically said so in our feedback. Granted, that's just a few data points, and it was internal. But besides that, the overall vibe I got from the very businessy, very not-engineer management behind the effort was that Watson was brilliant, as demonstrated on Jeopardy, and the main stuff left to do was some plumbing to connect our stuff to some of that Watson brilliance, and of course the business details of the partnership between the companies. Glad I got out of there.

vijucat 5y ago

Man, I was so excited by that Jeopardy win. I fired up my Eclipse Prolog and went through a few example from "A Gentle Guide to Constraint Logic Programming via ECLiPSe", http://www.anclp.pl/ http://www.anclp.pl/, and Bratko. It would have been such a win for Prolog if IBM Watson did well. See https://www.cs.nmsu.edu/ALP/2011/03/natural-language-processing-with-prolog-in-the-ibm-watson-system/ https://www.cs.nmsu.edu/ALP/2011/03/natural-language-process... for more context (Of course, that's just a sub-system I'm focusing on; there's a lot more to Watson than parsing).

faangiq 5y ago

Watson was always an obvious sham designed to generate some good TV ads. Anyone who didn’t see this deserved to get fleeced.

quintes 5y ago

Can’t read the full article.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

drunkenmagician 5y ago

I worked on a project 4 years ago using some of Watson's cloud services (Its more a brand than a product now). Worked ok for us, certainly on par or better than Google / Microsoft's offerings at the time. We actually had contact with some of the original Watson team, that had some interesting insights / details - needless to say, much of Watson is 'brand marketing' and not really hard AI science ... bit like every other 'AI' product in the market right now I guess - Disclaimer: I work for a cloud software company building AI products ... ;)

MR4D 5y ago

I see tons of comments on how IBM sucks. Fair enough - they do. However, consider that IBM is selling off its AI crown jewel to “* refocus its business on cloud computing and AI services*.” So an IBM that does something like that knows it has a problem and is killing off the parts it doesn't need, so it can simplify and improve focus. To me, this is a good indication that the new IBM will be quite different from the recent IBM, and more like the old IBM (pre 1980’s).

sc68cal 5y ago
IBM can't do cloud. https://www.protocol.com/enterprise/ibm-lost-public-cloud https://www.protocol.com/enterprise/ibm-lost-public-cloud Source: I was part of "GC" in that article.
NikolaeVarius 5y ago
I dont think I've met a single person who has used IBM cloud that has anything at all not despicable to say about IBM cloud.

killjoywashere 5y ago

Good riddance. The number of smart people who expected me to comment intelligently on Watson’s plumbing in the before-times was disturbing. Trying to be very polite when saying “I have no idea what Watson does, and I’m not sure you or the person you talked to does either” is ... not my strong suit.

ai_ja_nai 5y ago

Happy to hear about it. It was an intolerable show of hubris, marketing babble and general pretentiousness.

dreamcompiler 5y ago

I expect Ken Jennings is experiencing some schadenfreude about now.

waffle_maniac 5y ago

https://www.cnbc.com/2017/05/08/buffett-says-ibms-watson-will-have-greatest-value-when-it-replaces-human-labor.html https://www.cnbc.com/2017/05/08/buffett-says-ibms-watson-wil... Imagine missing all the successful tech companies and then investing in this!

zeroesandones 5y ago

sad, I was really excited about the tech when I first heard it