alt Hacker NewsI 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")
Watson was intended to solve fuzzy optimization problems.
Unfortunately, the way it solved fuzzy was 'engineer the problem to fit Watson, then engineer the output to be usable.'
Which required every project to be a huge custom implementation lift. Similar to early Palantir.