alt Hacker NewsWatson was nothing like ChatGPT. The first iteration was a system specifically built to play Jeopardy. It did some neat stuff with NLP and information retrieval, but it was all still last generation AI/ML technology. It then evolved into a brand that IBM used to sell its consulting services. The product itself was a massive failure because it had no real applications and was too weak as a general purpose chat bot.
I had no idea about what Watson was initially meant to solve.
I do remember they tried to sell it - at least in the meeting I went - as a general purpose chatbot.
I did try briefly to understand how to use it, but the documentation was horrendous (As in, "totally devoid of any technical information")