If I were IBM management, I'd be getting a laugh out of all of this. When IBM had to scale back their ambitions for Watson, especially those related to automating medical diagnoses, they were roundly mocked. Do not ask, dear tech companies, for whom the bell of AI overpromising tolls - it tolls for thee!
I agree in principle, but Watson was a lot of different things, mostly unrelated to any “modern” AI tech.
Edit: the Watson that played Jeopardy was smart (for that time) natural language processing, that backed on to a large fact store, generated from natural language processing of a relatively small set of sources like Wikipedia.
The Watson that was sold to companies was essentially a consulting service. I'm sure they had some re-usable components, but it's possible those components weren't much more than data pipelines, model training, etc. Most of the smarts were people doing a ton of data science specific to each problem. Worthwhile, but only good compared to companies who don't have a data science function.
Conversely, "modern" AI is things like LLMs, which have their own problems of course, but are a huge paradigm shift compared to Watson.
