I'm beginning to believe IBM is a sinking battleship. Considering the job losses and the - insane - direction set by the board, it's not obvious IBM will still be around five years from now.

Besides, a really good AI should literally be able to sell itself, surely?

No. That's not the issue. We are actually able to shrink wrap it to a point that it has reasonable footprint (a few servers). The problem with factoids are twofold: - It's always a small part of a broader use case (how many queries do you do on Google that are answered by the factoid pipeline?). - It has a lot of domain dependency. It's fine to do it like Jeopardy for general domain, but our customer want domain specificity and that's non-trivial.

I agree. I think this is exactly why it isn't available as an API. They probably had supercomputers worth backing Watson, which they couldn't provide for every single API query. Although I still don't know why they didn't provide it and price it accordingly -- $1 / question or whatever it would require. Or shoot -- price it at expense as a loss leader. Even if they had a person filtering and approving each jeopardy answer they could price it to allow that.