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IBM has recently delivered a string of disappointing quarters, and announced recently that it would take a multibillion-dollar hit to offload its struggling chip business. But Will Knight writes at MIT Technology Review that Watson may have the answer to IBM's uncertain future.
IBM's vast research department was recently reorganized to ramp up efforts related to cognitive computing. The push began with the development of the original Watson, but has expanded to include other areas of software and hardware research aimed at helping machines provide useful insights from huge quantities of often-messy data. “We’re betting billions of dollars, and a third of this division now is working on it,” says John Kelly, director of IBM Research, said of cognitive computing, a term the company uses to refer to artificial intelligence techniques related to Watson.
The hope is that the Watson Business Group, a division aimed making its Jeopardy winning cognitive computing application more of a commercial success, will be able to answer more complicated questions in all sorts of industries, including health care, financial investment, and oil discovery; and that it will help IBM build a lucrative new computer-driven consulting business.
But Watson is still a work in progress. Some companies and researchers testing Watson systems have reported difficulties in adapting the technology to work with their data sets. “It’s not taking off as quickly as they would like,” says Robert Austin. “This is one of those areas where turning demos into real business value depends on the devils in the details. I think there’s a bold new world coming, but not as fast as some people think.”
IBM needs software developers to embrace its vision and build services and apps that use its cognitive computing technology. In May of this year it announced that seven universities would offer computer science classes in cognitive computing and last month IBM revealed a list of partners that have developed applications by tapping into application programming interfaces that access versions of Watson running in the cloud. Big Blue said it will invest $1 billion into the Watson division including $100 million to fund startups developing cognitive apps. “I very much admire the end goal,” says Boris Katz adding that business pressures could encourage IBM’s researchers to move more quickly than they would like. “If the management is patient, they will really go far”.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Sunday November 09 2014, @10:25PM
Sometimes its more interesting to read these things in reverse:
Big Blue said it will invest $1 billion
will be able to answer more complicated questions in all sorts of industries, including health care, financial investment, and oil discovery
This seems to assume more than $1B is being left on the table, or that even a godlike intellect could collect more than $1B by grabbing nickels in front of steamrollers. Hand wavey aside, I don't think the money is there.
Its a pity because it MIGHT be a tens of millions of dollar business and if there's one thing businesses are notoriously bad at, its down scaling, so once it becomes obvious its more of a $10M biz than a $10B biz, the crash will be epic.
So for example, the question about health care is we have a societal meme that you'll pay anything for health, and the health care system has sprung up with innumerable middlemen to collect every penny you can spare of the "anything" you'll pay for health. Kind of like higher ed. How is AI supposed to increase profits? I guess you could reduce costs with death panels, but revenue is kind of flat line / dropping along with the greater economy, not to mention the social unrest its causing. I guess Watson could be put to work on anti-socialized medicine astro-turf, more of a preserve a dead / dying biz model than improve it?
Oil discovery is another mystery. "We" as a mid 1900s era species have no great difficulty finding it and pumping every economically viable drop out (and beyond). And once its gone, we're done. Limits to discovery and pumping primarily revolve around 3rd world issues like bribes/taxes and insurgent bombers. Price depends mostly on wall street manipulation and economic activity (a collapse in commodity price due to a collapse in consumption faster than decline in production is not necessarily good news LOL)
So I'm just sayin, where's these billions being left on the table? Specifically, not magic hand wavey singularity babble?
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Monday November 10 2014, @12:30AM
I think the real moneymaker for AI is advertising. When it gets good enough they won't even need a product, they'll only need enough infrastructure to process your donations.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 2) by takyon on Monday November 10 2014, @03:07AM
IBM would like to know where the profit comes from too. Basically they want to rent out Watson as if it was a "consultant". It's less of an AI and more of a "Big Data" oriented supercomputer that can organize information, although "difficulties in adapting the technology to work with their data sets" confirm that Watson isn't too far ahead of the Semantic Web or machine learning in usefulness. There's a lot of data out there, but if it's not in a highly structured and meaningful format, it's difficult for a system to make the data useful. Health care was one of the earliest applications for Watson that IBM hyped up. Supposedly Watson has parsed hundreds of thousands of new medical papers and 1.5 million patient records. The idea there is that no doctor can keep up with cutting-edge medical science (especially gene therapy and other genomics). You input symptoms and other patient data, you might get a diagnosis or other information in return. Oil discovery? It's a supercomputing target [hpcwire.com] (see also: Auto-Tune [wikipedia.org]), but I have no idea what Watson could bring to the table. Finance certainly uses trading algorithms that could possibly be improved by "cognitive insights".
I think a big problem with selling high-performance computing or "Big Data analytics" is that every potential customer has unique objectives that would require a lot of planning and programming to address. Big Data is full of marketing hype and it's not always clear how to benefit from computing resources. One barrier to entry has fallen: with "the Cloud" you don't need to commit to buying your own expensive and soon-to-be-outdated hardware. Watson could eliminate another barrier by allowing even idiots to dump data into it and get fancy analysis in return. That means more Big Data customers (at least IBM hopes so). Some bigger customers may buy hardware in order to have their own in-house Watson (and better security). IBM has created an API for Watson [wired.com]. IBM wants more data, and they want some killer apps to show off the capabilities of the system. I think of Watson as an unproven Wolfram Alpha [wolframalpha.com] on steroids, emphasis on unproven.
Ultimately the Watson strategy is all about IBM getting out of hardware sales [soylentnews.org] and doubling down on more lucrative software and consulting businesses.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 10 2014, @09:43AM
Why don't they just ask Watson?