“There’s been surprising progress in the problems of perception, seeing, hearing and language,” said Peter Lee, corporate vice president for Microsoft Research. At Enlitic, a start-up in San Francisco, Jeremy Howard, the founder and chief executive, believes that A.I. can transform the huge industry of health care, saving lives and money — an ambition similar to IBM’s. “But that’s a 25-year project,” he said. Enlitic is concentrating first on radiology. Medical images are nearly all in digital form, Mr. Howard notes, and the tireless scanning for telltale signs of abnormal tissue is a task for which deep-learning image recognition technology is well suited. Enlitic has tested its software against a database of 6,000 lung cancer diagnoses, both positive and negative, made by professional radiologists. In research soon to be published, its algorithm was 50 percent more accurate than human radiologists, Enlitic said. “You have to take technology that works and apply it to a known problem,” Mr. Howard said. “Innovation alone is a mistake.” 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.
The delayed progress of IBM Watson, a cognitive technology that enables healthcare professionals to access unstructured and previously unobtainable medical data, demonstrates the 'slow process of commercializing new technology', claims The New York Times. Despite this, Watson has received substantial investment over the past five years as a form of AI technology and specialists are optimistic concerning its development and integration into the industry.