Comment by wickedsight

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.