Watson is IBM's artificial intelligence service. You may remember it from Jeopardy. Core ML is Apple's machine learning integration framework. It's been called the PDF of AI. Bring them both together, and what do you get? An easy way for IBM and Apple customers to have the data models they need on the devices that are always with them.
From Apple Developer News:
Discover new ways to build intelligence into your iOS apps. With IBM Watson Services for Core ML, it's easy to build apps that access powerful Watson capabilities right from iPhone and iPad, so you can provide dynamic, intelligent insights that improve over time. Your apps can quickly analyze images, accurately classify visual content, and easily train models using Watson Services.
From IBM News:
Watson services on the IBM Cloud provide rich and relevant insights from a variety of public and enterprise data sources to applications. IBM's approach to data and privacy with Watson ensures that client data and insights are not shared with IBM or third parties, and that client data does not contribute to training a centralized knowledge graph.Apple's Core ML is a foundational machine learning (ML) framework that lets you integrate ML models into your app. Core ML delivers optimized performance for Apple products with minimal memory footprint and battery consumption impact. User privacy is protected as data is stored locally and encrypted by default.
It reads like a great fit. Watson and Core ML are complementary services for enterprise customers. It let's IBM's data models be where people want and need them, and it shows the continued momentum of Core ML as the common deployment interface for AI in apps.
It's also great from a privacy point of view: Both Apple and IBM have repeatedly said and shown that they want customer data to remain customer data, not feed their own advertising models in a not-yours cloud.
Be interesting to see how this develops.
