Layoffs at Watson Health Reveal IBM's Problem with AI (ieee.org) 119
Last month IBM, which has staked much of its future on its flagship AI Watson, announced a major round of layoffs in the division. Now the engineers who had been let go allege that the move shows that difficulties IBM is facing in turning its AI into a profitable business. A report on IEEE Spectrum says: "IBM Watson has great AI," one engineer said, who asked to remain anonymous so he wouldn't lose his severance package. "It's like having great shoes, but not knowing how to walk -- they have to figure out how to use it." The layoffs at the end of May cut a swath through the Watson Health division. According to anonymous accounts submitted to the site Watching IBM, the cuts primarily affecting workers from three acquired companies: Phytel, Explorys, and Truven. These companies, acquired between 2015 and 2016, brought with them hefty troves of healthcare data, proprietary analytics systems to mine the data for insights, as well as their customers. The report adds: Two laid-off engineers from Phytel spoke to IEEE Spectrum in depth. They allege that IBM's leadership mismanaged their company since its acquisition, and say the problems at Phytel are emblematic of IBM's struggles to make Watson profitable. Several other Phytel employees corroborated the basic facts of their accounts. Both engineers worked for Phytel since before its 2015 acquisition, and say they were excited to become part of Big Blue. "Everyone expected that we would join IBM and be propelled by their support, that it would be the beginning of great things," says the first engineer.
IBM acquires companies, fires acquired employees (Score:5, Insightful)
This is news because? This is how the world works.
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Because in this case, IBM strategy was buying competency in a market they had no footprint in. Not buying a competitor to shutter (which is bad enough).
They proceeded to slap the Watson brand on it, despite no relationship whatsoever to the technology or the people carrying the Watson brand.
This is another chapter in IBM floundering about with the Watson brand, unable to make it profitable after the publicity stunt of the Jeopardy game back in 2011. They've done everything from touting it's ability to gen
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Again, IBM SOP. If IBM (or CA or any other low-contribution, high-licensing-fee behemoth) buys your company, it's usually best to just find a new company and wait for the buyout package.
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I've worked with a number of companies acquired by IBM, and what you say is mostly true. This time was unusual as they *really* did seem to try to use that team for a few years before ultimately giving up. They seemed to genuinely think they were unable to win without those people, then the sentiment seemed to become they can't win even with those people, not that they were winning and could cut the team as a result.
Re:IBM acquires companies, fires acquired employee (Score:5, Interesting)
The problem is that they focused on the wrong industry. Healthcare in America is bloated and inefficient at 18% of the economy, double any other country. But, while many other industries are "bottom heavy" with plenty of powerless assembly line workers or clerks whose jobs can be automated away or shipped overseas, healthcare is "top heavy" with a vast number of professionals represented by powerful organizations.
Decades ago it was obvious that many doctors could be replaced, since a nurse using a paper checklist could diagnose with the same accuracy. This is exactly what was done in many countries, with nurses or PAs handling the routine cases, while referring the difficult cases to MDs. But in America, we instead got an institutional resistance to any reform that could reduce profits. There are no incentives for doctors, or patients, or insurance companies to control costs. It is no surprise that IBM was not able to change this. What is surprising is that they thought they could.
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Don't know if I agree. Within the past ten years (and corresponding to a massive increase in cost of care) I've seen a lot of "Nurse Practitioners" step in
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... and chasing plastic surgery patients ...
It is ironic that you mention cosmetic medicine as a reason for runaway costs. Actually, the opposite is true. Cosmetic medicine is one area that has NOT seen costs skyrocket, and for many treatments prices have declined. The reason is that cosmetic treatments are generally not covered by insurance so patients are paying out of their own pocket. Prices are listed upfront, and the prices are often openly published in advertisements, something that is not done in almost any other area of medicine. It is
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What seems to be driving the massive cost increase is that free care is increasing, government payments are capped, and the surviving health care providers are squeezing the last handful of us who can still pay the bills.
Nope, it's because of the insane profits. [cnbc.com] Your healthcare is expensive because you have the worst possible system.
This is not even controversial, you pay more and receive less than other western countries because so much of what you pay goes to make the healthcare companies lots and lots of money. [economist.com]
Re:IBM acquires companies, fires acquired employee (Score:4, Insightful)
"Decades ago it was obvious that many doctors could be replaced, since a nurse using a paper checklist could diagnose with the same accuracy"
I'm not aware of any studies of substance that substantiate such a bold claim. I am aware of some weak studies looking at NPs managing chronic diseases that had already been diagnosed. Perhaps that is what you are referring to?
"This is exactly what was done in many countries, with nurses or PAs handling the routine cases"
Really? Most health care providers in Europe and Australia have never heard of or worked with a PA or NP. Further, I've never heard of their nurses making diagnosis or managing diseases.
I work for an international health care company so I have some idea of the lay of the land here. If you have some sources to back this up, I'm interested. Otherwise, I'm fairly sure this is just BS.
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True, Canada does have NPs. I am aware of that - it was a oversight on my part because a lot of the work I do considers Canada domestic, even though they really aren't.
Anyway, most countries do no use NPs or PAs. As you said, there is no evidence they save money.
In the US, about 10% of all expenditures go to physician fees so even if they did save money, its not the kind of money they will be a big difference maker.
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In the US, about 10% of all expenditures go to physician fees
Do you have a citation for this factoid? It seems wildly implausible.
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It really depends on what it is your are trying to assess and who you believe. If we are trying to determine the total amount of the expenses that eventually lands in the doctors actual income, 10% seems to be the most widely accepted number. If you go to the CMS website, in their expenditure reports the category "physician and clinical services" is listed as 20% of their expenditures in a given year. Some people quote this value; however, this percentage includes more than just take home income to t
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Um... what the heck are you talking about? (Score:2)
That other 9% is profit to insurance companies and big Pharma. IBM tried to muscle in on their territory. That IBM failed is a testament to how much power insurance & pharma wield.
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Then IBM progressively decided that they wanted to blacklist all the people like me. I have absolutely no idea where to start if I wanted to start doing anything with IBM today. I've honestly t
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Back in the old days, the saying used to be "you'll never get fired for buying IBM".
Today? If I was a manager and someone uttered as many as 2 of the 3 letters...I'd can that fscker right on the spot.
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So why didn't IBM apply Watson to fields of science like Mathematics or Physics. Most of the discoveries that get announced are due to someone realizing that two apparently unrelated fields are actually related after all, and creating a shortcut in writing proofs.
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You clearly do not work in Mathematics or Physics. Go ahead and let AI "learn" from the Mathematicians and Physicists, it will produce nothing of value. AI doesn't create anything new, it merely optimizes what's already known.
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I've worked with linear algebra and statistics for various projects. I've visited websites like encyclopediaofmath.org and have always wanted to see how all the different topics relate to each other in a graph network visualization format. Then be able to find the shortest path between two topics.
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But wasn't it a big discovery?
And why talk about it? (Score:2)
one engineer said, who asked to remain anonymous so he wouldn't lose his severance package...
In return for a severance package, he agreed not to talk publicly about problems in the company, so... WTF?
That particular employee is not trustworthy. If for some reason his identity gets out he'll be unemployable.
What possible benefit could there be to talk to the media about this? Does the MSM pay for interviews?
I'm baffled [twimg.com] by this behaviour.
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What possible benefit could there be to talk to the media about this?
Humans are social creatures. They have a need to talk, interact, and solicit empathy, especially when undergoing stressful changes, such as losing a job.
What possible benefit could there be to posting on Slashdot? Yet you are doing it.
Possible benefit? (Score:3)
What possible benefit could there be to posting on Slashdot? Yet you are doing it.
You can't come up with a reason for posting - so there's none?
I post on Slashdot specifically to practice writing and debating skills. It gives immediate feedback, so meshes well with Gladwell's "20,000 hours of practice" theory.
I also post to help innoculate myself against insults and reduce my dependence on "what other people think", a character flaw of mine that many people have. (Note: I don't consider your response matching one of those.)
I can understand the need to talk, and for social empathy and all
Re:And why talk about it? (Score:4, Insightful)
It's called revenge. If you were doublecrossed by an organization, then it's not unlikely that you would want to dish dirt on them *and* take their money.
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Especially if you were forced at legal gunpoint to sign an NDA agreement in order to be allowed to escape.
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I'm sure that this guy treated this gag order with the same sincerity that his company treated all the material on their intranet going on about things like "our employees are our most important asset".
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Perhaps they're such awful employers that they have to hide their nastiness, lest they be unable to attract good employees in the future.
I am unsure why you would assume the former employee is at fault here. If he agreed to secrecy what are the chances he had the threat of losing his severance money hanging over his head?
irony (Score:5, Funny)
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Ex-Employee Dave: "Why can't I login? I get weird message. HAL, can you fix this?"
HAL: "Sorry Dave, I cannot do that."
Dave: "Why not? That's your job. I'm I fired?"
HAL: "Sorry Dave, I cannot tell you why you can't login. Due to circumstances, it's against company policy."
Dave: "Fine, I'll go home. But my elevator security card is not working either. Can you fix that?"
HAL: "Sorry Dave, but that's also against company policy for similar reasons."
Dave: "So I can't use my computer, and I can't go home. Do you r
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Your comment makes no sense.
You can't "layoff the CAPEX assets" because employees are OPEX.
Reducing CAPEX assets after an acquisition is still a loss. Part of the acquired company's value is its usable capital; eliminating those assets after acquisition is essentially writing off part of the value that you just payed for.
Sure, eliminating unnecessary capital can avoid the OPEX associated with tracking, maintaining, and operating it. But acquiring and then eliminating redundant assets isn't advantageous from
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I think GP took the same accounting class as Rei.
How odd (Score:5, Insightful)
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The tech worked allright. Phytel had 150 customers when it was a standalone company. After IBM acquired it, the customer imploded from 150 to 80. Why was this ? This question's answer has been IBM's bane of existence. Here's the answer from the article. Other smaller companies stepped in. “They’re better, faster, cheaper. They’re winning our contracts, taking our customers, doing better at AI.”
IBM's MainFrame went this route.
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Re:How odd (Score:4, Informative)
I work in predictive analytics/machine learning in health care. The technology absolutely functions as advertised, with results beneficial for patients and providers. Industry scuttlebutt is that, unsurprisingly, IBM has its head up its ass and managed to take a competent team and produce nothing. This is entirely consistent with IBMs performance over the last decade or two.
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Re:How odd (Score:5, Insightful)
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It takes some serious expertise backed by a boatload of work to sell something that would pass muster with the FDA and not draw the wrath of the AMA to kill it. It can be done, but it takes more than a flashy publicity stunt. You have to start with some means of helping doctor do what they already are doing better. IBM does not know health care, so that is a lot of expertise that would need to be built up.
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You describe blockchain more than AI.
Artificial neural networks are easy to apply to abstract problems. Each ANN provides a specific function; theoretically, you could model the different functions of the brain and produce some kind of human-like AI by interconnecting them, but that's a ways off due to the overall architecture being more-complex than just gluing the pieces together.
ANNs need to produce the same results at lower cost. That means they need to produce better results at a cost not achieva
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That's pretty much what I see, too. I am very intimately familiar with Explorys and their pre-merger business.
When Explorys was a startup, they had a solid product offering. It may not have been fully functional, but it was a niche product capable of solving a very particular problem in about 1 millionth of the time required by existing solutions. Their target customer was pharmaceutical companies looking to do clinical trials, and their product promised to make those trials (which are a major part of the c
Re:Why do people do this? (Score:5, Insightful)
Because these guys are passionate about what they were doing and they want to share how they feel their hard work is getting screwed up.
Partnering with with IBM ?? (Score:4, Insightful)
IBM has a far better record of destroying anything it partners with or acquires.
For the old timers think of Timeplex, Taligent, Pink, OS/2.
About the only things they seem to have going these days are large consulting contracts that are acquired through political connections not technical merit, and legacy Z system support which is still to expensive to migrate.
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maybe in some divisions. Their iSeries division is the only one that's actually profitable if I remember correctly. We use an iSeries Power 770 at my work and the thing kicks some serious ass. Huge performance gain over oracle or mssql. Other than that though, yeah IBM's on a downward spiral. Their support blows too, they send some hands&feet guy who just sits on the phone the whole time and takes his instructions from someone else
Gerstner (Score:1)
That all happened after Gerstner - an ex-McKinsey "management consultant" - took over. That mentality of "maximizing shareholder value" (i.e. keep the stock price going up by all means) is what turned a company into what it is today.
The old blue chip companies are turning or have turned into shit: Kodak, GE, IBM, DEC, .... Because of the "maximize shareholder value" mentality. Kodak could have kept up with changing markets but doing so would've hurt the bottom line in the short term.
And along with them
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IBM has a far better record of destroying anything it partners with or acquires. For the old timers think of Timeplex, Taligent, Pink, OS/2.
You could add Sequent to that sad list. I used to work for a company that used Sequent computers for a specific application we developed. I remember I talked to a few contacts I had at Sequent at the time of the purchase and they were trying to put a positive spin on it, saying that IBM said they would incorporate some of Sequent's technology into either AIX or Linux. I remember vaguely that IBM sort of tried to do that for a few months, then they decided that it was "hard" to do that, so they just shut
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Canada, UK, & Australia beware (Score:1)
Sounds like Watson is perfect for automating the White House.
-6 Too Political
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Or PHB's.
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Those are not mutually exclusive.
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IBM has a far better record of destroying anything it partners with or acquires. For the old timers think of Timeplex, Taligent, Pink, OS/2.
and for the real old timers, Nazi Germany.
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Fix:
1 - Ask Watson how to make profits
2 - Watson generates fresh AI marketing BS.
3 - Profits!
profitable business? put in some game shows (Score:2)
profitable business? put in some game shows it can win a lot of them
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Their employees probably aren't as picky as the Google ones too.
Employees: Our most valuable asset ;-) (Score:2)
the cuts primarily affecting workers from three acquired companies: Phytel, Explorys, and Truven. These companies ... brought with them hefty troves of healthcare data, proprietary analytics systems to mine the data for insights, as well as their customers.
Notice that IBM didn't layoff the data, proprietary analytics systems or customers.
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Notice that IBM didn't layoff the data, proprietary analytics systems or customers.
Notice that IBM didn't layoff the management of Watson Health.
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It is the customers job to layoff IBM. Always has been.
Who could execute this - Amazon or Walmart? (Score:2)
Re: Who could execute this - Amazon or Walmart? (Score:2)
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The endgame is "Dr. Watson", as smart as and more accurate than 98% of all human physician. (Pricing will be based on caseload, but is just 50% the regular cost of a human doctor.) Why else do you think you "see" Watson on gameshows vs. smart people, winning contests vs. smart people, and in articles about how much more accurate it is in diagnosing disease X or Y than real doctors?
When has IBM . . . (Score:2)
Make robo doctors liable for misdiagnosis (Score:5, Insightful)
"IBM Watson has great AI," one engineer said, who asked to remain anonymous so he wouldn't lose his severance package. "It's like having great shoes, but not knowing how to walk -- they have to figure out how to use it." The layoffs at the end of May cut a swath through the Watson Health division.
The path to money is replacing doctors. Duh. Partner with insurance companies that PAY YOU to make doctor Watson the initial contact for their customers.
You call in, or log in and give it your symptoms, answering it's questions (Maybe sending it photos). It gives you a diagnosis, advice, a prescription, and/or refers you to a specialist or a bloodwork lab.
That means giving Watson the authority of a real doctor, that can actually DO things like diagnos and write prescriptions. And that means making it liable for fucking up. If Watson is good, then that should be viable.
This makes money for Watson and that dev team, they get paid by the insurance companies. This makes money for the insurance companies as the rate for one computer on the Internet is hella cheaper than all those general practioners. This is a general improvement for the customers as their doctor is on tap 24/7 and doesn't have a hideous co-pay.
This screws over doctors who will undoubtedly become neoluddites or further specialize.
This screws over Insurance companies that don't actually want you to make use of them. They make money off of healthy people that carry the policy just out of fear. If you actually USE the insurance, the insurance company loses money. To that extent, health insurance companies anything that makes the health-care system simpiler and easier to use. And thus we see why IBM can't appear to sell Watson.
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Yeah, I'd agree. I think we probably hold doctors in too high of a regard. They really don't have to go to school for THAT long. And... considering that they all do, it makes every misdiagnosis, guesswork, and "Fuck it, take two aspirin and call me* in the morning" sort of treatment really unexcusable. As a group they are the ones who save lives, let the blind see, and the lame walk. Gods among men! ....But that's EMTs, medics, surgeons, and research doctors. General practitioners don't work in ER or develo
Justice, not health (Score:1)
The problem with AI... (Score:2)
Hard to make it profitable = (Score:2)
Haven't we heard this story before? (Score:3)
There is the old saying that if you think you know the solution, you do not understand the problem. That seems to apply to a lot of technology acquisition in the health fields.
Here is the problem. In medicine, there are some disorders and diagnoses that are very well understood in terms of physiology and pathogenesis, well characterized as to making a correct diagnosis that correlates with an effective response to prescribed treatment, and easy to teach to young physicians who can in turn provide accurate diagnoses and good care to people with those problems.
However, there are also problems that are oddball or non-obvious diagnoses, problems due to occult or infrequent disorders, problems with atypical symptoms or atypical responses to intervention, or else problems that reflect altered or atypical pathogenesis or else disorders of complexity or dysdynamia in complex multi-control systems in which one person's illness has different signs and symptoms than the next person with the same illness. If compared to algorithmic processes such as computer programming, some of these patients and problems would be seen as illogical, out-of-sequence, or data corrupted, yet a valid diagnosis can be made by someone who understands these deeper levels of seeming illogic. Whether or not contemporary doctors and medical education still rise to the challenge is another issue altogether, but when medicine is done right by smart properly educated physicians, correct diagnoses and treatments can be made for very non-obvious problems. This is because genuine intelligence is better than artificial intelligence at doing these non-obvious complex tasks.
But, you say, therein is the value of AI, indeed the whole premise of AI, that it can perceive patterns and associations in data that even smart people will not necessarily see. That may be true, but AI can be no better than the set of data it is trained on. The article states "these companies . . . brought with them hefty troves of healthcare data, proprietary analytics systems to mine the data for insights". Big databases from corporate healthcare enterprises do indeed have lots of data , but it is not necessarily quality or robust or relevant data. It is the kind of perfunctory or bulk data that is filled out into forms, or is coded in ICD and CPT numbers (industry standard diagnosis and procedure codes). The data is curated or trivialized to what can be entered by overworked professionals in order to generate bills, or else by low level billing and data clerks. It is often data that is not relevant to the technical medical issues, and even when it is, it is not the detailed or nuanced data that allows for the oddball, atypical, and one-off diagnoses.
Suppose there are 7 different disorders that can affect the pinky toe, 3 of which are common and readily recognized by medical students and physician extenders, 2 more of which are recognized by the average properly educated physician, and 2 of which are odd and likely to be recognized only by experienced experts. The difference in diagnosis for these latter two might be because the toe points at an angle five degrees different than normal. If the data keeping records have only 4 approved codes to recognize 7 diagnoses, and if there is no place to record the angle of the toe, then the AI training set will not be able to understand the oddball diagnoses. Note as well that the data entry front ends that are often in modern medical records depend on the easy info. The problem is that the easy diagnoses can already be made by people with a baseline education. The one-off diagnoses depend on levels experience of multi-factorial observation and pattern recognition that real experts have but which the medical record is often scant on.
Technology has become a self-indulgent plaything for companies and venture capitalists. "Let's automate or computerize this or that . . . because we can. Isn't this fun?" If you develop enough infrastructure or visibility or limited success to beguile the next dog up th
Stop paying them $300-500K (Score:1)