IBM announced new updates to its Watsonx platform at the THINK conference. It has been one year since watsonx was introduced. In addition to the new feature updates, IBM also announced its upcoming data and automation capabilities designed to make artificial intelligence (AI) more open, cost-effective, and flexible for businesses. CEO Arvind Krishna shares the company’s plans to invest in, build and contribute to the open-source AI community as a core part of IBM’s strategy.
“We firmly believe in bringing open innovation to AI. We want to use the power of open source to do with AI what was successfully done with Linux and OpenShift. Open means choice. Open means more eyes on the code, more minds on the problems, and more hands on the solutions. For any technology to gain velocity and become ubiquitous, you’ve got to balance three things: competition, innovation, and safety. Open source is a great way to achieve all three.” – Arvind Krishna, CEO
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IBM’s Release of Granite Models and Launch of InstructLab
IBM has open-sourced its advanced Granite language and code models to encourage developers and experts to push the frontiers of AI in enterprise environments. Available under Apache 2.0 licenses on platforms such as Hugging Face and GitHub, these models range from 3B to 34B parameters, catering to tasks such as application modernization and code generation in 116 programming languages. IBM’s testing revealed strong performance across various benchmarks, beating larger models.
The base code model, Granite, with 20B parameters, powers the IBM Watsonx Code Assistant and does very well at a range of tasks, such as SQL generation from natural language. In cooperation with Red Hat, IBM announced InstructLab, which enables continuous development of models using incremental contributions. The idea is to leverage open-source contributions to deliver more client value through integrations with watsonx.ai and the Red Hat Enterprise Linux AI solution. IBM Consulting will also offer help to leverage InstructLab in training purpose-specific AI models that meet the needs of the enterprise.
What the New Updates of Watsonx Offers?
- Annual Revenue Growth: the potential to unlock an estimated $4 trillion in annual economic benefits across industries.
- Address skills gap, data complexity and trust challenges: Watsonx Orchestrate will help clients build their own AI Assistants across domains.
- Watsonx Code Assistant for Enterprise Java Applications: Planned availability in October 2024, watsonx Assistant for Z to transform how users interact with the system to quickly transfer knowledge and expertise (planned availability in June 2024), and an expansion of watsonx Code Assistant for Z Service with code explanation to help clients understand and document applications through natural language (planned availability in June 2024).
- NVIDIA GPU offerings will offer NVIDIA L40S and NVIDIA L4 Tensor Core GPUs: To help enterprises and developers address the needs of AI and other mission-critical workloads.
- Quick AI deployment: It empowers enterprises with security and compliance capabilities to help them protect their data and manage compliance controls. Read this blog to learn more about IBM Cloud capabilities.
- Generative AI-powered data products and capabilities: Augment how organizations observe, govern, and optimize their increasingly robust and complex data for AI workloads.
What are the new vision and capabilities for AI-powered automation?
IBM is innovating around the future of business amidst hybrid cloud and AI transformations. As companies navigate multiple cloud environments and thousands of applications with millions of dependencies, automation becomes very important in saving time and improving the speed of decision-making. IBM brings AI-powered automation capabilities to help CIOs transition from proactive IT management to predictive automation. The tools are key to improving the enterprise infrastructure’s speed, scalability, security, and cost efficiencies.
The IBM automation, networking, data, and infrastructure management products include Apptio and Instana, allowing businesses to manage complex IT environments easily. IBM’s latest announcement to acquire HashiCorp further fortifies its multi-cloud automation capability. At its THINK event, IBM previewed a new generative AI-powered tool called IBM Concert, which is supposed to be released in June 2024.
IBM Concert is powered by watsonx AI and serves as the enterprise technology and operations command center. It gives AI-driven insight into application portfolios, from problem identification to prediction and suggested solutions. Integrated with a customer’s system, IBM Concert applies generative AI to data from multiple sources to provide a connected view of applications.
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Conclusion
IBM continues to advance its ecosystem of partners to offer clients choice and flexibility through bringing third-party models onto watsonx. It enables leading software companies such as AWS, Adobe, Palo Alto, SAP, Salesforce, and more to embed watsonx capabilities into their technologies and offer IBM Consulting expertise for enterprise business transformation. IBM Consulting has rapidly expanded its global generative AI expertise, with 50,000+ practitioners certified in IBM and strategic partner technologies. Its ecosystem of partners, large and small, is helping clients adopt and scale tailored AI across their businesses.
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