IBM Watson Group Buys AlchemyAPI To Enhance Machine Learning Capabilities
Source: http://techcrunch.com/2015/03/04/ibm-watson-group-buys-alchemyapi-to-give-it-machine-learning-capabilities/
IBM Watson, the artificial intelligence platform made famous by beating the three best Jeopardy! champions ever several years ago, bought Denver-based AlchemyAPI today. It did not reveal the purchase price.
The acquisition gives Watson a key piece of machine learning technology. The deal also gives it access to community of over 40,000 AlchemyAPI developers, who are building cognitive apps, which IBM defines as “systems that learn and interact naturally with people to extend what either humans or machine could do on their own.”
This is a natural extension of what Watson is doing around artificial intelligence and natural language processing.
Stephen Gold, VP at IBM Watson Group says the newly purchased company processes billions of API calls each month across 36 countries and eight languages, which could at least partly explain why the Watson Group was so enamored with it.
This is is encouraging. I think as the AI giants merge and consolidate the different tech, into one unified version, a true AI will “wake up” one day. If you combine the language recognition, and the Image Recognition portions from Watson and Google, you have parts of what makes up a whole. Eventually. As if putting together a large jigsaw puzzle. As Deep Learning gives way to more efficient learning algorithms, we will eventually build the dream Alan Turing envisioned.