Whilst Watson had severe limitations, it is important not to underestimate its contribution to the development of AI.īeating a human at Jeopardy! required a previously unseen level of understanding of the nuances of human languages, including tone, puns, and allegories. However, the computer was not yet ready to take over the world with a commercial application. Watson’s TV performance demonstrated that the scientists were on the right path. Computers also use NLP to transform spoken language into written documents. Facial recognition technology is another application. Today, we see NLP in practice whenever computers succeed at identifying correctly what is in an image. According to head scientist David Ferrucci, the goal of Watson had been to improve the natural language processing (NLP) ability of computers. Interpreting language and understanding words and patterns is one of those key behaviors that Watson was initially designed for. LanguageĪrtificial intelligence is the simulation of human intelligence processes by computer systems or other machines. For many spectators, the computer became synonymous with AI. Consumers learned that, in the future, Watson may be able to tackle some of humanity’s biggest problems, such as climate change and cancer care. The supercomputer even went on 60 Minutes. IBM’s marketing department enlisted celebrities like Bob Dylan and Serena Williams to talk to Watson and build trust with the general public. Whilst Ferrucci left IBM several months later, the company continued to push its message. This programming made the computer highly efficient at Jeopardy! but did not necessarily enable it to complete other tasks. He explained that Watson had been trained specifically to understand word patterns and predict the correct answers of a trivia game. Whilst the leadership of IBM may have been highly enthusiastic about the potential of the computer, its main developer, David Ferrucci, urged caution. They talked about exploring what Watson could do for industries as varied as law, healthcare, finance, and academia. Leaders at IBM were happy to look at the win as the beginning of a technological revolution that would transform society. When Watson succeeded at Jeopardy!, the event reignited interest in AI, simply by demonstrating its potential. Scientific and economic interest dropped somewhat, prompting what historians now refer to as the winter of AI. The actual development of AI was held back by the lack of computers powerful enough to handle the volume of data required to complete meaningful predictions. Instead, artificial intelligence became the subject of science fiction books and movies, predicting different versions of a technology-driven future. Therefore, it is hardly a surprise that development was slow over the following decades. Just a few years after the end of World War II, this technology would have seemed entirely futuristic to many people. Codebreaker Alan Turing first coined the term in the 1950s. The history of AI has always been marked by ups and downs, many of them witnessed by the Watson Lab at Columbia University. Watson is far from being a household name, whereas Alexa and Siri may not be used by every household, but most adults would be able to identify what they are. However, since then, the computer manufacturer has been bested by the likes of Google, Amazon, and Microsoft. At the time, IBM looked set to become a leader in the next technological revolution – the field of artificial intelligence technology. In 2011, IBM’s cognitive computing system Watson beat humans at one of our all-time favorite TV game shows, Jeopardy! Watson defeated Ken Jennings, the best human Jeopardy! player ever, and demonstrated the potential of AI by answering questions packed with puns and subtleties. Business Optimization Promise of IBM WatsonĪlso Read: Will a robot take my job? | The Age of A.I.
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