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IBM Watson
The smartest machine ever built
Watson is an IBM supercomputer that combines artificial intelligence and sophisticated analytical software as a “question answering” machine. Its applications are complex, but almost endless. Most recently it acquired the assets of the Weather Channel, to become the world's most accurate weather forecaster. It is named for IBM's founder, Thomas J. Watson
Few technologies have attracted the sort of claims that IBM has made for Watson, the computer system on which it has pinned its hopes for carrying AI into the general business world. Named after Thomas Watson Sr, the chief executive who built the modern IBM, the system first saw the light of day five years ago, when it beat two human champions on an USA question-and-answer TV game show, Jeopardy!
But turning Watson into a practical tool in business has not been straightforward. After setting out to use it to solve hard problems beyond the scope of other computers, IBM in 2014 adapted its approach.
Rather than just selling Watson as a single system, its capabilities were broken down into different components: each of these can now be rented to solve a particular business problem, a set of 40 different products such as language-recognition services that amount to a less ambitious but more pragmatic application of an expanding set of technologies.
Though it does not disclose the performance of Watson separately, IBM says the idea has caught fire. John Kelly, an IBM senior vice-president and head of research, says the system has become “the biggest, most important thing I’ve seen in my career” and is IBM’s fastest growing new business in terms of revenues.
But critics say that what IBM now sells under the Watson name has little to do with the original Jeopardy!-playing computer, and that the brand is being used to create a halo effect for a set of technologies that are not as revolutionary as claimed. “Their approach is bound to backfire,” says Mr Etzioni. “A more responsible approach is to be upfront about what a system can and can’t do, rather than surround it with a cloud of hype.” Nothing that IBM has done in the past five years shows it has succeeded in using the core technology behind the original Watson demonstration to crack real-world problems, he says.
The debate over Watson’s capabilities is more than just an academic exercise. With much of IBM’s traditional IT business shrinking as customers move to newer cloud technologies, Watson has come to play an outsized role in the company’s efforts to prove that it is still relevant in the modern business world. That has made it key to the survival of Ginni Rometty, the chief executive who, four years after taking over, is struggling to turn round the company.
Watson’s renown is still closely tied to its success on Jeopardy! “It’s something everybody thought was ridiculously impossible,” says Kris Hammond, a computer science professor at Northwestern University. “What it’s doing is counter to what we think of as machines. It’s doing something that’s remarkably human.”
IBM’s initial plan was to apply Watson to extremely hard problems, announcing in early press releases “moonshot” projects to “end cancer” and accelerate the development of Africa. Some of the promises evaporated almost as soon as the ink on the press releases had dried. For instance, a far-reaching partnership with Citibank to explore using Watson across a wide range of the bank’s activities, quickly came to nothing.
Since adapting in 2014, IBM now sells some services under the Watson brand. Available through APIs, or programming “hooks” that make them available as individual computing components, they include sentiment analysis — trawling information like a collection of tweets to assess mood — and personality tracking, which measures a person’s online output using 52 different characteristics to come up with a verdict.
At the back of their minds, most customers still have some ambitious “moonshot” project they hope that the full power of Watson will one day be able to solve, says Mr Kelly; but they are motivated in the short term by making improvements to their business, which he says can still be significant.
This more pragmatic formula, which puts off solving the really big problems to another day, is starting to pay dividends for IBM. Companies like Australian energy group Woodside are using Watson’s language capabilities as a form of advanced search engine to trawl their internal “knowledge bases”. After feeding more than 20,000 documents from 30 years of projects into the system, the company’s engineers can now use it to draw on past expertise, like calculating the maximum pressure that can be used in a particular pipeline.
To critics in the AI world, the new, componentised Watson has little to do with the original breakthrough and waters down the technology. “It feels like they’re putting a lot of things under the Watson brand name — but it isn’t Watson,” says Mr Hammond.
Mr Etzioni goes further, claiming that IBM has done nothing to show that its original Jeopardy!-playing breakthrough can yield results in the real world. “We have no evidence that IBM is able to take that narrow success and replicate it in broader settings,” he says. Of the box of tricks that is now sold under the Watson name, he adds: “I’m not aware of a single, super-exciting app.”
To IBM, though, such complaints are beside the point. “Everything we brand Watson analytics is very high-end AI,” says Mr Kelly, involving “machine learning and high-speed unstructured data”. Five years after Jeopardy! the system has evolved far beyond its original set of tricks, adding capabilities such as image recognition to expand greatly the range of real-world information it can consume and process.
With its purchase of the Weather Company’s digital assets for a reported $2 billion in 2015, IBM took another big step in that direction, acquiring an enormous arsenal of local data about weather conditions. The information, which was already being used by companies in the airplane, insurance, and agricultural industries, could be put through IBM’s Watson system to produce new understandings of weather patterns and more accurate forecasts. Using Watson for such real-world, consumer-centric applications could help IBM gain a reputation as a data company, not a computer company, and might be good for business, too: It says that $500 billion worth of annual commerce is dependent on weather.