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Innovation proceeds in small steps and it can take decades for a new technology to “fully mature”.  Innovation proceeds in gigantic leaps forward, that leave us breathless trying to grasp what has just happened. Or both.

Here’s an article from NYTimes sketching the “progress” of IBM’s “Watson” AI program, which also includes a quote from another company working on AI for healthcare.

“You have to take technology that works and apply it to a known problem,” Mr. Howard said. “Innovation alone is a mistake.”

 

As “lean startup” suggests, one needs to develop from within the market to know what customers are going to support. But sometimes one needs to be big enough, and smart enough, to create a market where one didn’t exist, and no one could imagine it. Companies as big as IBM for instance.

Watson was a very expensive program that needed to be rethought and reimplemented. IBM had enough capital to do the first version which got only “so far”, and then could afford to pivot to another very expensive incarnation, and still survive.

Usually that’s only possible for companies like Apple or Microsoft or IBM or Google or Amazon or Elon Musk or Zuckerberg…. that have enough assets to innovate both in expensive small steps and ingreat leaps forward, even without initial or even foreseeable ROI.

When even those entities can’t afford the risk, one depends on government funding in the early versions of innovative technology. Like commercial space, for example, which is now “boosted into orbit” far enough  for risks to private enterprise to be “acceptable” (while still substantial.)

 

No company has made as big or as broad a bid to commercialize its A.I. technology as IBM has with Watson. It set up Watson as its own business in 2014, and invested billions to accelerate the development and adoption of the technology, including buying several companies. The Watson unit now has 7,000 employees.

 

The Watson technology has been totally revamped. In its “Jeopardy!” days, Watson was a room-size computer. Today, it is so-called cloud software, delivered over the Internet from remote data centers. The Watson software itself has been carved up into dozens of separate A.I. components including a language classifier, text-to-speech translation and image recognition.

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