
IBM Has a Watson Dilemma - denzil_correa
https://www.wsj.com/articles/ibm-bet-billions-that-watson-could-improve-cancer-treatment-it-hasnt-worked-1533961147
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pm90
Like much of IBM, Watson was/is a good platform for doing certain tasks, but
blown completely out of proportion by IBM marketing. Not to mention that they
now explicitly use it as a branding tool ("Watson Cloud", "Watson Health"
etc.)

On the one hand, you have Google open sourcing AI tools, courses, adding TPU-
enabled machines on their cloud and using their own AI tools to do some pretty
neat stuff. On the other, you have IBM marketing deliberately deceiving
ordinary consumers as to what its capable of. Its not that hard to take a
side.

Disclaimer: I do not currently work for either company

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threeseed
I don't understand your point here.

Google is not a competitor to IBM and so there is no "choice" to be made
between the two. Sure Google has open sourced some great technologies (as have
many others) but they are raw, low-level tools for Data Scientists to use.
They aren't OOTB products ordinary people can use.

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whymauri
I thought one of Watson's main projected uses was healthcare. Isn't Google's
stake in healthcare via DeepMind actually make them competitors in that sense?
Unless I'm missing something here, I have not researched Watson a lot.

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wavefunction
They're competitors in the sense that neither are worth anything to the
average medical Doctor at this point.

I don't mean this as a disparagement, merely as a dispassionate observation.
Doctors need alerts about contra-indications of drugs they and their patients'
other doctors have prescribed more than they need AI-derived diagnoses, for
example.

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rscho
I regret having only one upvote to give you. The state of information flow in
today's clinical settings is depressingly bad, especially when you see what
computers can do today. The focus on trendy techs we are experiencing in
hospitals really reflects how backwards people have their priorities.

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imroot
I have a friend who is an OB/GYN Oncologist in Indianapolis. Her hospital had
IBM Watson Health on campus last year, and she mentioned to me in passing last
month that they finally had kicked IBM off of their (learning) university's
campus. When I asked her why, she said:

"Often times, Watson would recommend courses of treatment that would be
completely incorrect, if not detrimental, to the patient. It became more of a
hassle than a learning tool, and since the Residents are operating under my
license, it's 'my way or the highway.'"

Hell, I went to an urgent care over the weekend, and they were still using a
old IBM e-series application built with COBOL -- and when the doctor was
inputting the drugs to prescribe, it warned him about potential interactions
between the different drugs -- not something I had seen the EPIC system that
my normal doctor uses do.

I still feel that there's a lot of good growth to be had for data scientists
in the Health Care field...but, Watson itself is probably not the answer, and
IBM should probably get rid of Ginni Rometty and find a new CEO, unless they
want to continue cutting IBM down to a skeleton of what it used to be.

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jpfed
I worked at Epic years ago, but even then it was able to warn about drug
interactions. But those warnings were configured on a site-to-site basis; your
normal doctor's hospital (or practice) may not have configured drug
interaction checks.

~~~
Herodotus38
Not only that, but if the software at the Urgent Care is that old, it may be
raising false flags on things that are no longer considered clinically
relevant and just present a hassle for the provider to click through.

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whitexn--g28h
The age of the software would not reflect the quality of the data. I'm
positive that these alerts are updated with new drugs and contradiction logic
continuosly.

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Herodotus38
You are right in that the age wouldn't necessarily correlate with quality, but
I can speak from first hand knowledge about the inertia that different EMRs
bring. A lot of these drug interactions are mild precautions or the evidence
changes with time. Ideally what is supposed to happen is a multidisciplinary
committee reviews the latest evidence and continuously updates the
interactions. What often happens though is that there isn't enough 'oomph' to
override a previously established notification so inertia wins. It's often not
until a major EMR upgrade where things get more closely looked at and some of
the less important flags/notifications get weeded out out. Definitely true
that new major interactions get added all the time and usually in a timely
fashion. As you can also imagine there is a medico-legal aspect of removing a
previous flag, so often it's easier to just leave it and make the provider do
an extra unneeded click.

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code4tee
Glad to see the broader market finally catching on to the marketing fluff
train that was “Watson”.

On the one hand IBM did an impressive job tapping into people’s desire for
“big data stuff” as a lot of uninformed folks talked a lot about “hey we
should get that Watson thing.”

On the the other hand messing with peoples lives via a bogus cancer curing
machine is some messed up stuff. These Watson boondoggle projects diverted a
lot of good resources that could have gone towards legit value-add research.

The whole Jeopardy thing was really cool and amazing marketing, but as anyone
who tries “Watson” knows the “Watson” IBM has been trying to sell is not the
Jeopardy thing.

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notzuck
What a horrible review. The cancer research isn't at all what you make it out
to be. It's legitimate and does have some real proven value despite the recent
backlash in certain parts of the press. It's not perfect but the advancements
that have been made are significant.

It's easy to stand on the sidelines and throw rocks at other peoples efforts
based on very little first hand information but please, this isn't twitter.

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code4tee
Not on the sidelines, I’m on the field. That’s why I’m glad to see the reality
finally getting attention. As the article says, a lot of healthcare
professionals that once were onboard have distanced themselves from IBM and
these projects.

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TheCondor
So is there a better oncologist’s assistant AI out there? Or is the sweet spot
somewhere between picking music you’ll like, suggesting when you should leave
for an appointment to manage traffic and playing chess or go?

I understand the dislike of the marketing, but something like Watson in
medicine is a moonshot attempt. Can CNNs and whatever other stuff Watson has
available to it simply not handle cancer? Or is it broken? Or is the
literature and training data bad or there just isn’t enough of it? I’m really
fascinated by the stories of it giving detrimental treatment suggestions, I
could see it happening a couple times and word getting out (like a new file
system corrupting data) but if that’s really normal then something is broken,
right? Maybe it’s misunderstanding the training literature, which should be a
correctable software bug. I’m just guessing.

~~~
code4tee
There’s nothing inherently wrong with the technology.

However, doing ML well isn’t really about the ML as much as it’s about getting
everything leading up to the ML right. That’s the difference between value-add
applications of ML and an expensive mess. IBM didn’t understand that and hence
the mess they’re in now with Watson.

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notzuck
"IBM didn’t understand that"

Can you explain a little further?

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davemp
My experience with Watson is a manager asking if I had any project ideas for
it because the company had “Watson time” that no one could think of a way to
use. I tried to picture the chain of events necessary for the exchange to have
taken place that wasn’t comical. I failed.

After being forced into ClearCase use at another company, I couldn’t help but
imagine how much damage IBM sales has done to the software industry. How many
inferior products have been propped up and resources drained by such dishonest
sales practices and poor leadership?

~~~
Spooky23
I’ve been in similar positions, but you can’t blame IBM — the situation that
you found yourself in has everything to do with decision making at your
employer.

You could tell the same story or worse about Oracle, HP, etc. The difference
is that IBM’s strategy of tying hardware to solutions has kept it viable far
longer than its competitors.

I’d argue that Microsoft is worse — at least IBM treats your boss’ boss to
steak and golf. Microsoft burrows in with bundled ELAs. The annual cost to
carry support + maintenance on some products is going to be as high as 39% of
product price!

~~~
davemp
> but you can’t blame IBM — the situation that you found yourself in has
> everything to do with decision making at your employer

I partially agree. I would say that both IBM and companies that get suckered
by them are dysfunctional.

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zitterbewegung
Watson is just IBM's way to market solutions based on ML. The whole Jeopardy
game where Watson beat the human contestants was a big advertisement for the
set of solutions. When I was in school a couple of professors went to IBM's
office . They were expecting a technical breakdown of how the Watson system
worked. Instead they just got some marketing that you would not need to have
to create code to solve problems. The professors promptly left after that.

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AdamM12
Watson as vaporware articles come up here about once a month. Not that the
articles are wrong. Just a bit amusing.

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jarym
So given that IBM’s only big commercial bet is (was?) Watson and it is clearly
not going to drive significant revenue.. what do IBM do next?

They ballsed up cloud, they let the rather impressive DB2 wither, and their
software suite is... meh.

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kevin_thibedeau
Broadcom might be interested in acquiring them.

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mikeyouse
Broadcom ($90b market cap) is worth 70% of what IBM ($133b market cap) is
worth..

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Dylan16807
If a company stops having good revenue sources their stock tends to drop..

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neonate
[http://archive.is/yoK65](http://archive.is/yoK65)

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verdverm
Do we have a rehash count on this? Getting old...

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chomp
Watson isn't what investors and the general public thinks it is. It's now more
or less some classifier/machine learning as a service plus a dev integration
team you can hire to pull it into your codebase (which by the way, is lots of
$$$) It is not difficult for anyone on HN to spend a weekend, read a machine
learning book, and replicate most of Watson's functionality. It's IBM
marketing at it's finest.

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webaholic
you are full of it. Are you sure you can replicate beating world class players
on jeopardy in a weekend?

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gojomo
While parent post is full-of-it on the general question of replicating
Watson's full bag-of-techniques against client problems in a weekend, I
believe the Watson Jeopardy victory was far less impressive than it seemed.

It's a very-constrained domain, and the challenge Watson won has never been
opened to scrappy teams other than IBM. I wrote up my doubts way back in 2011:

[https://memesteading.com/2011/02/16/ibm-watson-
overprovision...](https://memesteading.com/2011/02/16/ibm-watson-
overprovisioned-big-iron/)

Here in 2018, I suspect a clever focused team could make a MacBook, with
current dumps of Wikipedia/Wikidata and a few other key reference materials,
competitive in most Jeopardy matches in a week or two. And, with 6 months to a
year, as dominant as "Watson" was against the Jeopardy champs.

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goatlover
> And, with 6 months to a year, as dominant as "Watson" was against the
> Jeopardy champs.

Was Watson dominant because it had a buzzer advantage, or because it could
answer the questions better? I recall the other two guys furiously trying to
hit the button on different occasions and sighing when Watson beat them out
yet again. Thing is we don't know that Watson was better at answering the
questions, only that it was better in the Jeopardy game play the way things
were setup.

