OpenAI's ChatGPT and picture generating AI systems like MidJourney and Stable Diffusion have got a lot more people interested in advanced AI and talking about it. Which is a good thing. It will not be pretty if the transformative changes that will happen in the next two or three decades take most of us by surprise. One company that has been pioneering advanced AI for longer than most is IBM. One of IBM's most senior executives, Alessandro Curioni, joined the London Futurists Podcast to discuss IBM's current projects in AI, quantum computing, and related areas.

IBM is busy reshaping itself for the future, moving out of commodity hardware and chip manufacturing and further into higher end, value-added services. At the heart of the new strategy is the artificial intelligence machine Watson, around which IBM now intends to build a business in cognitive computing. The vision of the 105-year-old company is that Watson works in tandem with users, doing the heavy-lifting analytics, but ceding the judgement to humans. In particular, it wants to help make sense of the data now pouring out of the Internet of Things (IoT). As part of the remodelling, the IBM is making some large investments in Europe, in areas including cloud computing, artificial intelligence and data analytics.

Over the past few years, IBM has been devoting a great deal of corporate energy into developing Watson, the company's Jeopardy-beating supercomputing platform. Watson represents a larger focus at IBM that integrates machine learning and data analytics technologies to bring cognitive computing capabilities to its customers. To find out about how the company perceives its own invention, we asked IBM Fellow Dr. Alessandro Curioni to characterize Watson and how it has evolved into new application domains. Curioni, will be speaking on the subject at the upcoming ISC High Performance conference. He is an IBM Fellow, Vice President Europe and Director IBM Research – Zurich Research Laboratory, Switzerland.