IBM to explore artificial intelligence in partnership worth over $200m with MIT
New York— IBM will spend $240m over 10 years to develop an artificial intelligence (AI) research lab with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), pooling the organisations’ resources as competition intensifies to produce breakthroughs in the field. The MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab will fund projects in four broad areas, including creating better hardware to handle complex computations and figuring out applications of AI in specific industries, the company said on Thursday in a statement. While IBM has always conducted long-term research internally, it decided AI was such a vast field that it needed to search for talent and ideas, said John Kelly, the head of IBM’s research and cognitive solutions groups, which includes Watson products. "The competition is really stiff in both business and academia, so we looked at this situation and spoke together and said, ‘let’s do something big’," Kelly said in an interview. While researchers will focus on long-term innovations in AI, IBM will ...
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