In the past couple years, we’ve watched IBM’s supercomputer Watson mature at an alarming rate. A concept birthed five years ago, the cybernetic prodigy is now Jeopardy! champ and doctor in training. Up next? Cross-industry and consumer applications in the cloud and your pocket.
This is the age of big data and, with Watson’s help, big answers—lightning quick.
If you’re a Singularity Hub regular, you know Watson well. The supercomputer defeated two human champions on Jeopardy! in early 2011. And later that year, Watson gave his first practical demo in medicine and inked his first big contract with insurance firm, WellPoint.
Sibling of Deep Blue, the Kasparov killing computer chess master, Watson is a collection of immensely powerful servers in Yorktown Heights, New York. Watson parses queries submitted by humans, runs numerous parallel algorithms on tens of millions of pages stored in his “brain,” and spits out an evidence-based response. All that in no more than two to three seconds, and at the relatively low cost of $3 million (per Watson-like setup).
But time moves swiftly in the world of technology, and those early accomplishments are now verging on ancient history. AIs beating humans at Jeopardy! is so 2011! What has our favorite cyber-prodigy done lately? And more to the point, what will he do in the future?
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