IBM Watson wins Jeopardy! against human champions
Partly confirmed
Importance: major (4 of 5)The takeaway
IBM’s Watson question-answering system defeated Jeopardy! champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter in a televised two-game match aired 14–16 February 2011.
Status
- Claim
Partly confirmed
- Our reporting
- Medium confidence
- Importance
- Major (4 of 5)
- Last verified
- 29 September 2026
Your AI and this story
- GPT-6 AstraIn its training data
- Claude Opus 5.5In its training data
- Gemini 4 HydrogenIn its training data
- Grok 4.7In its training data
It happened before the cutoffs of all four assistants, so it can be in their training data.
Key facts
- Final episode aired 16 February 2011
- Watson’s total: $77,147 vs. Jennings $24,000 and Rutter $21,600
- Built on the DeepQA architecture combining many NLP and retrieval techniques
- Ran on a cluster of IBM Power 750 servers
What happened
Watson answered natural-language trivia clues in real time, beating the two most successful human players in the show’s history.
Why it matters
A high-profile demonstration of open-domain question answering, a decade before LLMs made such capabilities general-purpose.
Sources
2 sources from 2 sites. Numbers match the chips in the text.
2 sources: 1 primary, 1 reaction
Primary
- IBM: Watson, Jeopardy! championibm.com, official
Reactions
- Wikipedia: IBM Watsonen.wikipedia.org, discussion
Changes
- Filed