Conversely if this the canonical failure case, why's everyone so harsh on Watson?
Because they keep claiming Watson can handle this kind of thing, they charged $60M for it, and failed.
That was $60M which could be spent on actual, real cancer research, or models which actually work.
For example, MSKCC[1] currently has a Kaggle competition[2] to do a roughly analogous task. The prize for that is $15,000, and they'll get something more useful for that than MD Anderson did for $60,000,000. Even taking into account it is probably costing MSKCC double the prize to have Kaggle run the competition it seems like IBM was ripping everyone off.
Because they keep claiming Watson can handle this kind of thing, they charged $60M for it, and failed.
That was $60M which could be spent on actual, real cancer research, or models which actually work.
For example, MSKCC[1] currently has a Kaggle competition[2] to do a roughly analogous task. The prize for that is $15,000, and they'll get something more useful for that than MD Anderson did for $60,000,000. Even taking into account it is probably costing MSKCC double the prize to have Kaggle run the competition it seems like IBM was ripping everyone off.
[1] http://mskcc.org
[2] https://www.kaggle.com/c/msk-redefining-cancer-treatment