I think you are incorrect and the same cynicism would hold true if RMS and Linus themselves wrote the software. The frustration with this claim is that it's missing a lot of data and it's a claim without a lot of rather important backstory.

- Why was Watson being used for this? (That is, whose idea, whose plan, whose test) - How many times was Watson wrong? (many others have asked this within the comments) - Is there a statistical significance to Watson's diagnosis? - How did Watson narrow it down? That is, did it provide a single conclusion of "it must be this form of leukemia" or was it just the most heavily weighted of several options?

The original ad-walled article from NDTV doesn't add a lot of information either on the specifics, though at least the siliconangle article is correction pointing out the limitations on this (needed a huge DNA repository to work with that would expose a lot of extremely private data, probably wouldn't work well for rarer ailments due to lack of data and inability to understand what it's actually looking at).

It is very good and I am happy that the lady was diagnosed correctly and promptly by Watson, and I do think this is important as something like Watson can cut down immensely on the grunt work that a lot of doctors go through. Already most jump on terminals in the patient room and pull up the relevant information from the hospital's internal libraries, so this just seems like the next natural step for modern healthcare; speed up those libraries.

But the cynicism comes from the lack of information, with how news like this gets portrayed (truthfully, I must credit to SiliconAngle for having a much more reserved approach to the article than the source they relied on), and IBM has been touting Watson as a miracle machine before, and they're certainly not curbing outrageous claims made by less careful publications and journalists.

That is the source of cynicism, and I really do think you'd find it as a result of just about any announcement like this from any person.

True, but I think it is sad that IBM uses the Watson name for everything related to AI, because this way they implicitly pretend to have found a unified approach to AI. I don't believe this is true. The AI doing the diagnosing is not the same AI as the one that played Jeopardy. But please correct me if I'm wrong.

As someone who's worked on/with teams building various Watson services/solutions over the past 3 years, I can confirm Watson is almost entirely a branding exercise without (from the engineering perspective) common leadership, coherent inter-team objectives, etc.

There isn't a 'unified approach' to anything here beyond the use of various open source machine learning libraries with huge amounts of medical data either licensed or acquired over the past 2 years.

Who exactly thinks its a good idea to hijack an existing brand for tangentially related, poorer quality products? Microsoft also does this with Skype and 'Skype' for business. Instead of a win-win scenario they hope for, they instead burn up the goodwill generated by the original product to bear the name. So instead of thinking "Watson, the amazing AI that won Jeorpardy", I now think "Watson, the horrible mishmash of IBM APIs"

IBM's primary sales channel is enterprise, where branding makes all the difference. Most of the time, the person authorizing the project has no idea on the technical details (and may or may not have solicited internal technical commentary).

These deals are honestly mostly about trust. Do they trust IBM / {vendor} has the expertise to deliver the project? Given that it's mostly bespoke integration, branding the entire IBM AI/ML area as "Watson" isn't too disingenuous.

The underlying algorithms may mostly be shared hence grouping them together as Watson just like Google uses Brain but I think it's more of a branding thing. It looks like they want to eventually make these systems work and run together to form a kind of"true AI"

> For better or for worse, IBM never seemed to have gotten into that business (yet?) of recording and selling every American's data for ads

I think they learnt their lesson on this particular issue shortly after the holocaust.

You would see many of the same comments no matter who claimed some kind of first in medical diagnosis. Expert systems have been coming up with diagnoses doctors missed for decades.

It's a fat target for automation because much of the expertise is available in diagnostic protocols and few humans can hold all that information in their heads and keep it up to date. MYCIN only used a few hundred rules and it could keep track of which antibiotics to use better than MDs.

Yeah I do think the large data sets and processing power available to systems like Watson and Deepmind etc can and should improve detection of many diseases. More than 100k people die in the us alone due to hospital mistakes. 12million misdiagnosed a year is huge number

Welcome to HN, if anything is not from a flashy company within farting distance of the bay area, it is uncool and fuddy-duddy.

> IBM never seemed to have gotten into that business (yet?) of recording and selling every American's data for ads.

Maybe not Americans, but they did pretty well from doing it for Europerans from 1936-1945. [1] and rather than ads, the Hollerith cards IBM supplied by the million tabulated the census data from 1930s Europe into Jew / Not Jew rather nicely.

When the death camps were liberated there was a special unit assigned to makes sure the leased Hollerith machines were returned to the USA safely.

Thomas J. Watson was one of four Americans to receive the Order of the German Eagle [2]

[1] http://ibmandtheholocaust.com/

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Order_of_the_German_Eagle

In the United States, IBM was the data processor for the Japanese internment camps in the US.

> "I think healthcare is more important than self driving Teslas..."

Well self driving cars in theory should save a lot of lives too.

Not only save, as a disabled person who cannot drive a car, self-driving cars would instantly improve my life experience.

This is an anecdote and could only be meaningful as statistics. Landing a booster stage once is an accomplishment, you can't guess you way to a stable landing. Making one diagnosis is not news. Especially since we can be sure they've tried to make many, and somehow they're only promoting the result of one.

Except, as person who doesn't plan on flying to space soon, but who will at some point in life need a good medical diagnosis, for purely selfish reasons, I would rather want the medical diagnosis to get more attention and improvement.

My question is if people don't believe this Watson thing any more, why don't don't they just prove that it exists.

Google has a specific division that is looking into life sciences and health care. Recently they made deal with British health service nhs for processing anonymised eye scans of millions of people using deepmind so that they are better able to detect degenerative blindness.

People are fickle, those names will be different in a decade.