AI Is Real Now: IBM’s Sophie Vandebroek

[Sponsored] In this episode: Why there will never be another “AI winter,” and what IBM and MIT are doing together to ensure that. More times than almost any other field of innovation, artificial intelligence has weathered recurring cycles of overinflated hope, followed by disappointment, pessimism, and funding cutbacks. But Sophie Vandebroek, IBM’s vice president of emerging technology partnerships, thinks the AI winters are truly a thing of the past, thanks to the huge amounts of computing power and data now available to train neural networks. In this episode Vandebroek shares examples of real-world applications enabled by this shift, from image recognition to chatbots. And she describes the mission of the new MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab, a $240 million, 10-year collaboration between IBM researchers and MIT faculty and students to focus on the core advances that will make AI more useful and reliable across industries from healthcare to finance to security. This episode is brought to you by Darktrace, the world leader in AI technology for cyber defense. Darktrace is headquartered in San Francisco and Cambridge, UK, and has nearly 2,500 customers around the world who use its software to detect and respond to cyber threats to their businesses, users, and devices. Darktrace has built innovative machine learning technology can spot unusual activity using an approach modeled on the human immune system. In the second half of the show, Darktrace CEO Nicole Eagan explains how Darktrace’s technology works and why companies need to bring new defenses to today’s cyber arms race. Business Lab is hosted by Elizabeth Bramson-Boudreau, the CEO and publisher of MIT Technology Review. The show is produced by Wade Roush, with editorial help from Mindy Blodgett. Music by Merlean, from Epidemic Sound.