I don't doubt that they hire some brilliant people, but I haven't encountered their product in the real world doing anything of note. It always seemed to me that IBM created some parlor tricks for PR, but that Google, Facebook, Tesla, Microsoft, et cetera have been years ahead of IBM at every turn.

You know I'd love to read a good article on the inner workings of Watson, especially in the early years (2008-2012).

I remember reading news pieces about Jeopardy and discounting it as a cheap statistical party trick, especially given how it was about the same time terms like "big data" started proliferating in the media.

I only became convinced about the potential of machine learning much later, when CNNs starting being impressively good at classification. This prompted me to look further into it and realize it's not the latest business buzzword but an emerging field.