The former AI pioneer has fallen behind.
(Photo: Getty Images, Mauritius, Reuters, Bloomberg (M))
Yorktown Heights, New York It’s a Wednesday night when millions of Americans are being shown the potential of artificial intelligence (AI) for the first time. In their own living room. On September 14, 2011, US television will broadcast “Jeopardy”, the country’s most popular quiz show. On the one hand a person: Ken Jennings, longtime record holder. On the other a machine: the artificial intelligence Watson, built by the tech group IBM.
Ratings climb to a record high. America is puzzling: Can an AI succeed in mastering a task previously unsolvable for computers: understanding a freely formulated question and spitting out a correct answer? One Answer. And not a long hit list of documents that could contain the answer, as Google provides it.
The result is history: The Watson computer, as big as ten refrigerators and fed with 200 million pages of encyclopedias, novels and the Bible, wins. “I, for one, applaud our new computer rulers,” jokes Jennings.
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