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.  Has it become obsolete?

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Summary:  Next time you bring up Artificial Intelligence and your non-data scientist friends all say “Watson” here’s some perspective you can offer.  Their understanding of AI and Watson is very likely to be inaccurate.  Here’s what you need to know to set them straight.

When conversation with my non-data scientist friends turns to AI it’s almost inevitable that at least one will remark on the wonders of Watson.  To many of the uninformed, Watson is…