Comment by wickedsight
6 days ago
That 'Watson' was fully purpose built though and ran on '2,880 POWER7 processor threads and 16 terabytes of RAM'.
'Watson' was amazing branding that they managed to push with this publicity stunt, but nothing generally useful came out of it as far as I know.
(I've worked with 'Watson' products in the past and any implementation took a lot of manual effort.)
Watson is more generally the computer system that was running the LLM. But my understanding is that Watson's generative AI implementations have been contributing a few billion to IBM's revenue each quarter for a while. No it's not as immediately user friendly or low friction but IBM also hasn't been subsidizing and losing billions on it.
What they had in the Jeopardy era was far from an LLM or GenAI. From what I've been able to deduce, they had a massive Lucene index of data that they expected to be relevant for Jeopary. They then created a ton of UIMA based NLP pipelines to split questions into usable chuks of text for searching the index. Then they had a bunch of Jeopardy specific logic to rank the possible answers that the index provided. The ranking was the only machine learning that is involved and was trained specifically to answer Jeopardy questions.
The Watson that ended up being sold is a brand, nothing more, nothing less. It's the tools they used to build the thing that won Jeopardy, but not that thing. And yes, you're right that they managed to sell Watson branded products, I worked on implementing them in some places. Some were useless, some were pretty useful and cool. All of them were completely different products sold under the Watson brand and often had nothing in common with the thing that won Jeopardy, except for the name.