Watson's 'Jeopardy!'-Winning Artificial Intelligence Is Now for Sale

In the tech behemoths' ongoing battle for supremacy, IBM has been taking a beating—more like Big Black-and-Blue, am I right? Eh? But the once-mighty corporation has something even the likes of Google and Apple don't: Watson, the “thinking” supercomputer whose artificial smarts famously bested its human competitors on Jeopardy!.

Today IBM announced it's invested $1 billion into a plan to commercialize Watson. Three years since the Jeopardy! splash, it’s pimping out the game show champ to businesses and developers to try to squeeze out some extra revenue from the machine. It's a bold move, nodding to a future ecosystem where man and machine combine their brainpower to achieve superhuman intelligence. If someone can pull it off.

Watson has the distinction of being one of the only cognitive supercomputers. It was designed to learn and understand the way people think through features like natural language and voice recognition programmed into it. While Google and Amazon both also rent out the massive supercomputers powering their cloud services to businesses and entrepreneurs, and Google, Apple, and Microsoft are all building new features leveraging machine learning and voice-recognition, Watson combines the two. It's like Siri on speed.

In November, IBM put Watson in the cloud, which made the supercomputer accessible remotely so developers could build software and apps on its API. Debuting this year from the Watson app store are Fluid, a personal shopping app, MDBuyline, which sells devices for hospitals, and WellTok, a kind of health insurance hotline.

Now the company is turning the focus to its nucleus, the business sector. The IBM Watson Group, backed in part by $1 million in VC money, will work out of New York's flatiron district— painfully nicknamed "Silicon Alley." And Watson 2.0 has a new look. The computer is 24 times faster and 90 percent smaller than when it made its television debut. It's shrunk from the size of a master bedroom to three pizza boxes stacked on top of each other.

Team Watson will focus on peddling Watsons to clients in data-rich industries: healthcare, financial services, retail, travel, telecommunications, pharmaceutical, and publishing. The idea is to use Watson as a tool to make it easier for businesses to capitalize on big data. The supercomputer can crunch numbers at speeds way faster than traditional machines, and it can understand human queries and respond with useful insights culled from the mass of information.

IBM's outlined three ways Watson can turn tricks for cash:

• Helping accelerate research, to spare companies some of the billions of dollars they spend annually on R&D;
• Making big data analytics more digestible by presenting insights in natural language and with visualizations; 
• Encouraging more businesses to develop big data initiatives (which would presumably lead to 1 and 2 down the road)

In other words, the company is renting out supercomputer-level artificial intelligence, which is a pretty significant and unwieldy undertaking. Already IBM is struggling with learning the technicalities of their customers' businesses in order to build useful software for the machine. But it’s a big step toward making supercomputing more accessible for the masses, which was always only a matter of time. No doubt we’ll soon see similar services coming out of Silicon Valley—souped-up versions of Siri or Google Now bound to give Watson a run for its money.