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It was an audacious undertaking, even for one of the most storied American companies: With a single machine, IBM would tackle humanity's most vexing diseases and revolutionize medicine.
Breathlessly promoting its signature brand — Watson — IBM sought to capture the world's imagination, and it quickly zeroed in on a high-profile target: cancer.
But three years after IBM began selling Watson to recommend the best cancer treatments to doctors around the world, a STAT investigation has found that the supercomputer isn't living up to the lofty expectations IBM created for it. It is still struggling with the basic step of learning about different forms of cancer. Only a few dozen hospitals have adopted the system, which is a long way from IBM's goal of establishing dominance in a multibillion-dollar market. And at foreign hospitals, physicians complained its advice is biased toward American patients and methods of care.
[...] Perhaps the most stunning overreach is in the company's claim that Watson for Oncology, through artificial intelligence, can sift through reams of data to generate new insights and identify, as an IBM sales rep put it, "even new approaches" to cancer care. STAT found that the system doesn't create new knowledge and is artificially intelligent only in the most rudimentary sense of the term.
Watson "has failed to end a streak of 21 consecutive quarters of declining revenue at IBM." Ouch.
(Score: 4, Touché) by ledow on Monday September 11 2017, @02:05AM (6 children)
AI claims turn out to be bollocks and just bulk processing, statistics and heuristics.
Also grass is green and sky is blue.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Virindi on Monday September 11 2017, @02:24AM (4 children)
Of course it is junk. But the world runs on pure hype now, and this has a lot of hype behind it. It is surprising it is not more adopted.
(Score: 2) by Geezer on Monday September 11 2017, @02:43AM (1 child)
Maybe if they marketed it as a "cloud app" with a cool Android interface it would sell better.
(Score: 2) by Virindi on Monday September 11 2017, @02:51AM
If they aren't already giving doctors phones with an "app" interface, I'd be shocked! And of course it is sold as 'cloud', that is only natural...
Maybe that's the problem: they are still using a phone, when they should integrate it into a voice activated IoT device. With cameras. Naturally all data is sent back to IBM for "quality control" purposes.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday September 11 2017, @02:56AM (1 child)
(Score: 3, Insightful) by takyon on Monday September 11 2017, @04:58AM
Getting the knowledge isn't as hard as they let on. It's getting the software right that's the challenge. If their software was better and more like a strong AI, they wouldn't need to ritualistically curate the knowledge.
The hardware AND software of 10 years from now will knock Siri, Alexa, and Watson out of the park. Maybe IBM bet on machine learning too early and won't see it to its conclusion.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by takyon on Monday September 11 2017, @04:30AM
It was understood to be like that. But it was thought that dumping a shit load of data into it would allow it to do things at least more impressive than answering trivia questions.
If that isn't the case, IBM could be doomed.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]