Watson – Time to Prune the ML Tree?

Summary: IBM's Watson QAM (Question Answering Machine), famous for its 2011 Jeopardy win was supposed to bring huge payoffs in healthcare. Instead both IBM and its Watson Healthcare customers are rapidly paring back these projects that have largely failed to pay off. Watson was the first big out-of-the-box commercial application in ML/AI. I'm sure I'm leaving out many other notable firsts that IBM has scored but since it's Watson we want to talk about, we'll stop there. The remarkable thing about Watson is that in 2011 the other skills that we think of as AI, image and video processing, facial recognition, text and speech processing, game play beyond chess, autonomous vehicles, all these were so primitive they were not yet close to commercial acceptance and wouldn't be for several more years.