IBM just committed $240 million to the future of artificial intelligence

IBM is officially partnering with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to run an artificial intelligence (AI) research lab. This Watson-branded joint MIT-IBM AI research initiative -- a partnership of acronyms -- will be funded through a 10-year, $240 million investment from IBM and will be co-located at IBM's Research Lab in Cambridge and at the MIT campus. According to an IBM press release, the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab will be one the largest long-term AI collaborations between a university and a member of the tech industry. Its goal is to enable more than 100 scientists, professors, and students to pursue research focused on such areas as the development of AI algorithms that could expand machine learning capabilities, the improvement of AI hardware, the exploration of AI's economic and societal benefits, and the identification of AI applications in key industries. The team at IBM knows that despite all the recent attention given to what AI can do, there's still so much that it can't.