3 ms·

Interesting to consider this in light of yesterday's news about the lack of success for IBM Watson in Healthcare. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30046432

Interesting to consider this in light of yesterday's news about the lack of success for IBM Watson in Healthcare. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30046432 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30046432 IBM’s Watson Health is sold off in parts

fnands 5y ago
Eh, I would argue there is a massive difference between drug discovery and patient care, which was what Watson was aiming for. Filtering out useful molecules from useless (or dangerous) ones is a nicely contained (if difficult) problem that ML is pretty good at solving.
- ramraj07 5y ago
  To say Watson was aiming for anything is an injustice to the word Aim.
  - Closi 5y ago
    How about "Watson was aiming to sell consulting services"?
  - TaylorAlexander 5y ago
    Aiming to market IBM as cool.
- bayesian_horse 5y ago
  AlphaFold doesn't sort out molecules. This paper took the 3D model of a protein predicted by the original AlphaFold paper and used that to test random small molecules against it, first virtually then physically.
epistasis 5y ago
Alphafold has a clear, easily stated application and problem it solves. Watson, like the AI craze in general, was mostly buzzwords and hype covering the fact that it was actually three application specialists in a trench coat trying to pass themselves off as machine intelligence.
- ATsch 5y ago
  Yeah, it was a pretty clever if misleading marketing ploy IMO. I don't think many people ever realized that "Watson" as a singular thing does not exist and is basically just the brand name of IBMs ML consulting and cloud services. I'm kind of surprised more companies didn't try follow suit, it would have been very easy to create the public impression that e.g. AlphaGo and AlphaFold were actually the same AI and available on GCP, or something like that. But I guess the deception breaks down faster when you're not hiring consultants.
Gehtio 5y ago
For me, what alphafold showed is probably one of the best and brightest teams technology wise and with Google the financial and resource availability. When I think about IBM I think about a business company. Google already added alpha fold into its gcp ai vertex service. They make stuff very very end user-friendly and have been doing this with ai for a while. The IBM health news was very disappointing to me and I would love to have more insight on it. Until I have I will just believe that IBM is just not tech savvy enough or was to early technology wise. Gcp also provides audit save and Industrie standards and complaince standards. They go so far that they have contracts with pentagon and co. They also have the cooperation with the (or one of the biggest) healthcare providers in the USA tx to there complaince support on gcp. After all GCP provides encryption on rest, in memory, with Google provided keys and customer provided keys. They also have gvisor. With the push of big companies like sap into the cloud, gcp aligns already to business companies globally.

fnands 5y ago

Eh, I would argue there is a massive difference between drug discovery and patient care, which was what Watson was aiming for. Filtering out useful molecules from useless (or dangerous) ones is a nicely contained (if difficult) problem that ML is pretty good at solving.

ramraj07 5y ago
To say Watson was aiming for anything is an injustice to the word Aim.
- Closi 5y ago
  How about "Watson was aiming to sell consulting services"?
- TaylorAlexander 5y ago
  Aiming to market IBM as cool.
bayesian_horse 5y ago
AlphaFold doesn't sort out molecules. This paper took the 3D model of a protein predicted by the original AlphaFold paper and used that to test random small molecules against it, first virtually then physically.

epistasis 5y ago

Alphafold has a clear, easily stated application and problem it solves. Watson, like the AI craze in general, was mostly buzzwords and hype covering the fact that it was actually three application specialists in a trench coat trying to pass themselves off as machine intelligence.

ATsch 5y ago
Yeah, it was a pretty clever if misleading marketing ploy IMO. I don't think many people ever realized that "Watson" as a singular thing does not exist and is basically just the brand name of IBMs ML consulting and cloud services. I'm kind of surprised more companies didn't try follow suit, it would have been very easy to create the public impression that e.g. AlphaGo and AlphaFold were actually the same AI and available on GCP, or something like that. But I guess the deception breaks down faster when you're not hiring consultants.

Gehtio 5y ago

For me, what alphafold showed is probably one of the best and brightest teams technology wise and with Google the financial and resource availability. When I think about IBM I think about a business company. Google already added alpha fold into its gcp ai vertex service. They make stuff very very end user-friendly and have been doing this with ai for a while. The IBM health news was very disappointing to me and I would love to have more insight on it. Until I have I will just believe that IBM is just not tech savvy enough or was to early technology wise. Gcp also provides audit save and Industrie standards and complaince standards. They go so far that they have contracts with pentagon and co. They also have the cooperation with the (or one of the biggest) healthcare providers in the USA tx to there complaince support on gcp. After all GCP provides encryption on rest, in memory, with Google provided keys and customer provided keys. They also have gvisor. With the push of big companies like sap into the cloud, gcp aligns already to business companies globally.