system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
When a modern A.I., such as IBM's Watson, "reads a book", or any other text, what is that program doing with/to that text?

A few weeks ago a 60 minutes piece on AI suggested that Watson read thousands of books in an incredibly short period of time. What exactly does that mean? In my mind it could be that the system is just placing it in a database? It could also mean that its running it through a filtering algorithm and assigning subject matter titles to it or plucking out supposedly important sentences? How does it process the words, sentences, and paragraph's of the work and then how it uses them later on?

Edit:  Thank you all for your great answers.
gpt
It can mean pretty much anything.  IBM marketing also just uses Watson all over the place to just mean "Machine Learning".  Depending on the particular task it's being trained for, that might mean taking words and parsing them semantic analysis or looking at images of pages and recognizing characters or building a search index or building a language model...  anything the particular system is being built to do.

And reading a thousand books in a short period of time...  on how many systems?  How many cores?  What storage and network topology?

Essentially, it's a buzz-wordy "we're quite cool" marketing speak that doesn't mean anything.