7Getting the Best Out of Your AI Team
“Alone we can do so little; together we can do so much.”
– Helen Keller
“Talent wins games, but teamwork and intelligence win championships.”
– Michael Jordan
AT THE DAWN of our current era of deep learning AI, IBM committed a blunder that has become a cautionary tale for big businesses' ambitions in artificial intelligence. In a 2011 episode of Jeopardy, one of the contestants was IBM's Watson supercomputer. They pit Watson against legendary contestant (and future host) Ken Jennings, whom it beat handily. Riding on that success, IBM executives were ready to promise even bigger things. AI would be an all-knowing assistant everywhere from office workers and farmers to oil prospectors and medical professionals.
They decided to start big and tackle cancer head-on, beginning with the renowned Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in Boston and MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. Drawing on the success of Watson on Jeopardy, which could quickly parse questions and provide accurate answers, they thought they could apply that same technology to cancer treatments and recommend personalized treatments to individuals.1
By feeding Watson all the medical literature they could and patient data, it would learn patterns and recognize the best treatments for given situations. However, cancer is a highly complex and dynamic disease, with numerous variables to consider, including patient characteristics, tumor characteristics, treatment guidelines, ...
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