The East Village is gaining the ideal neighbor – helpful, extremely intelligent and famous. “He” also happens to lack eyebrows, but everybody has their flaws.
The supercomputer Watson, best known for its Jeopardy appearance, is moving on up to IBM’s New York headquarters, the company announced on Thursday, along with some big plans for their master-minded machine, according to CNN.
Like, $1 billion big.
That’s how much IBM plans to invest in its brand new Watson Group, a division of the company solely focused on putting East Village’s newest resident to work in ways that far outweigh borrowing a cup of sugar.
Trying her best not to sound too much like a super-villain, IBM CEO Virginia Rometty promised reporters that “this is a new era of machine-human collaboration.”
As to the East Village, the neighborhood was chosen to refresh the company’s image, according to the newly appointed head of the Watson group, Michael Rhodin.
“The millennial generation gets this, they understand what this is,” Mr. Rhodin told Crain’s. “This is a departure. It’s a statement on our part.”
In addition to Watson boosting East Village’s generation-Y street cred, the supercomputer will also be collaborating with Memorial Sloan-Kettering and The Cleveland Clinic. The computer will be learning to recognize different forms of cancer and prescribe the right type of treatment.
“It’s learning to reason, to think through things,” Mr. Rhodin said to Crain’s. “And even when it reads contradicting information, it has to sort that out, just as we do.”
We are totally psyched to have Watson move to New York. It seems only natural that our inevitable overlord would be a New Yorker.
