In 2011, The Supercomputer That Won Jeopardy Was The Size Of A Master Bedroom. In 2014, It's The Size Of Three Pizza Boxes.
In 2011, Watson could fit in a large bedroom. Now, in 2014, the supercomputer has been shrunk to the size of "three stacked pizza boxes."
This detail comes as part of the larger announcement that IBM is opening a business unit for its Watson team, based in New York City. It will host about 2,000 employees.
Watson will be used to explore the field of "cognitive computing," or training a computer to interact with a user by way of natural language and analytics. It's computing more closely linked to how people think instead of how computer's have conventionally operated to date.
IBM isn't the only company working on this either. Google Now, an virtual assistant app for Android and the iPhone, can respond to natural language queries and provide you with the answers you need by intelligently digging through the Internet.
The largest retail banking group in France, Crédit Agricole, says that the new Watson business unit could account for up to 12% of IBM's revenue in 2018. For the sake of comparison, the company's 2012 revenue was $104.5 billion.