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hile AI is still in its infancy recent
Wdevelopments promise an exciting
future for this relatively new frontier
IBM’s supercomputer may have put humans
of machine intelligence. IBM’s Watson

to shame by winning at Jeopardy
in 2011, but since then it has only
Watson as grown in power, intelligence, and
speed while sucking up oceans of
data and shrinking in physical size.
Today’s Watson now operates at
24 times the power of its Jeopardy
a Service has made Watson available as a
winning days, and shrunk to a size
that is 90 times smaller. Now IBM

cloud service, giving any business
the ability to tap into a huge database
of disparate information with natural
language queries, and potentially
reducing research time to a matter of
hours or days, rather than weeks and
months.

IBM has big plans for Watson, earmarking
$100 million in 2014 for venture capitalists
to develop innovative Watson apps, and
creating the new $1 billion Watson
Business Group. There are two new
streams for Watson as a service
with the Discovery Advisor service
aiming squarely at the publishing,
education, and health care sectors
and the IBM Watson Analytics
Advisor focusing on the business
sector. If you look at it critically it’s
almost like IBM is endeavoring to create a
highly targeted Siri like service.

Given Watson’s ability to save lives by allowing
medical researchers to enter natural language
queries for faster and more effcient medical
diagnosis, it promises exciting things if the same type
of performance can be achieved in the business sector.
Technology infrastructure is expensive and always a
fnancial risk, so offering Watson as a software service
puts businesses in a better position as far as availability
and costs are concerned. There’s less risk to try it out as
there’s no need to devote capital towards putting in the
infrastructure to make it all work. Technology capable of
Watson like prowess would basically entail the installation
of a supercomputer – overkill for most businesses, and
out of reach for the average startup.

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