In February 2011, IBM Watson defeated Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter on Jeopardy!. The system combined dozens of NLP, search, and scoring techniques over a huge corpus.
The event was a media splash comparable to Deep Blue. IBM pivoted to “cognitive computing” in health and enterprise, with mixed commercial results.
Technically, Watson illustrated heterogeneous systems engineering just before end-to-end LLMs dominated—a reminder that public milestones do not always match the architecture that later wins.
