How does IBM Watson compares to LLMs?
Once upon a time, there was a Watson. By IBM. Whatever happened to that? Did it ever take off as a commercial enterprise product? How does it compare in its architecture to LLMs of the day?
I'm not sure You could call Watson an product at any given time in its history. The thing is that it was mainly a marketing stunt (the Jeopardy) and the technology behind it never was production ready and IBM was not able to turn it in anything reasembling real product. Sure they used the name, stamping anything that seems like AI with it (for example I remeber that there were some IBM Cloud services for sentiment analysis in text that were pushes inside this whole AI initiative).
But in the end it all seemd just like a gateway drug for IBM to shove some consulting teams down their clients throats.
I do recall being impressed by watson marketing at that time. What turned me off was that some of their cool examples were closed source and the whole developer platform felt buggy or under-documentated. Eventually watson faded away as i never saw other people using it. Now it feels like the whole purpose of watson was to make quick bucks to some ibm corporate dudes. Btw what else is ibm doing nowadays, other than riding its own brand and becoming increasingly irrelevant? When i hear ibm i associate it with old people who lost their craft in enterprise nonsense
Yes, a lot of thunder for so little rain.