What Ever Happened to IBM’s Watson?

Physicians grew frustrated, wrestling with the technology rather than caring for patients. After four years and spending $62 million, according to a public audit, MD Anderson shut down the project.

“They chose the highest bar possible, real-time cancer diagnosis, with an immature technology,” said Shane Greenstein, a professor and co-author of a recent Harvard Business School case study on the Watson project at MD Anderson. “It was such a high-risk path.”

IBM continued to invest in the health industry, including billions on Watson Health, which was created as a separate business in 2015. That includes more than $4 billion to acquire companies with medical data, billing records and diagnostic images on hundreds of millions of patients. Much of that money, it seems clear, they are never going to get back.

Now IBM is paring back Watson Health and reviewing the future of the business. One option being explored, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal, is to sell off Watson Health.

Back to Reality

Many outside researchers long dismissed Watson as mainly a branding campaign. But recently, some of them say, the technology has made major strides.

In an analysis done for The New York Times, the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence compared Watson’s performance on standard natural language tasks like identifying persons, places and the sentiment of a sentence with the A.I. services offered by the big tech cloud providers — Amazon, Microsoft and Google.

Watson did as well as, and sometimes better than, the big three. “I was quite surprised,” said Oren Etzioni, chief executive of the Allen Institute. “IBM has gotten its act together, certainly in these capabilities.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/16/technology/what-happened-ibm-watson.html