>To me, the main mistake was the series of commercials giving the strong impression that IBM already had this incredible Artificial General Intelligence 100% c

>To me, the main mistake was the series of commercials giving the strong impression that IBM already had this incredible Artificial General Intelligence 100% correct. Had IBM marketed Watson for what it actually is - an enterprise version of Amazon Alexa or Google Assistant (which admittedly didn't even exist at the time) - they'd be in a completely different spot. Instead we got the Bob Dylan commercials (which under the covers was just speech to text, a hardcoded dialog tree, and text to speech) and all the "Watson is curing cancer" nonsense (which under the covers was just a rules engine sitting on top of a search engine intended to provide customized treatment plans). The actual technology works, but it's an NLP platform for building chatbots and search engines (think intent classifier, relevancy ranker, named entity/semantic relationship/sentiment annotators) not the AGI that it was marketed as.