In one of the most lucrative partnerships ever between a corporation and a university, IBM will team up with MIT to engage in 10 years of "fundamental AI research." The $240 million deal will go toward the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab, a mix of IBM researchers and 100 MIT academics working at the MIT campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The goal, said IBM reps, is to "advance AI hardware, software, and algorithms related to deep learning and other areas, increase AI's impact on industries, such as health care and cybersecurity, and explore the economic and ethical implications of AI on society."
Working from offices in Kendall Square—a neighborhood that's become an incubator for many hybrid academic/corporate startups—researchers at the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab will be focused on basic research with an eye toward commercializing what they discover. IBM wants to "encourage MIT faculty and students to launch companies that will focus on commercializing AI."
MIT has had a number of these academic/corporate partnerships over the years. Perhaps most famously, the MIT Media Lab has contributed to countless successful products, and tech companies can pay to outsource their research and development to Media Lab groups.
IBM's AI project Watson is already focused on health care, and MIT has a long history of generalized AI research. MIT professors John McCarthy and Marvin Minsky founded one of the world's first Artificial Intelligence Labs at MIT in 1959, and they popularized the term AI. The AI Lab became so well-known that, in the late 1960s, filmmaker Stanley Kubrick and writer Arthur C. Clarke asked Minsky to advise them on how to create a realistic AI called HAL for the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey.
But we've come a long way from Minsky's failed early experiments with perceptrons. Today, the MIT-IBM Watson lab will explore machine-learning algorithms and their applications to everything from quantum computing to what they ambiguously describe as "help[ing] individuals achieve more in their lives."
Though some of the discoveries in the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab will no doubt get spun up into independent startups, the goal is obviously to enlist MIT scholars in IBM's efforts to rule the AI space. They'll be competing with Alphabet's DeepMind, DARPA's AI projects, Apple and Tesla's attempts to create AI for self-driving cars, and many other companies that are exploring everything from simple chat bots to complex, decision-making algorithms that deal with large datasets.
Ultimately, what many at this new lab are hoping for is that ineffable breakthrough that will lead to something resembling human intelligence, only better. Let's hope the ethicists on staff have some plans for what to do if that happens.
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