IBM announces Watsonx at the Think conference, a new "enterprise studio for AI builders" that includes generative AI models.
On the heels of IBM's announcement that it will stop hiring for some positions for now because they may be replaced by AI in the future, the company is announcing Watsonx, a new AI platform. According to the company, Watsonx is designed to help companies leverage artificial intelligence in their businesses.
IBM's Watsonx is designed to provide businesses with the tools, infrastructure, and support to build their own foundation models, customize existing models with their own data via fine-tuning and deploy them in their environments. The models developed can then be validated and monitored using Watsonx. IBM described Watsonx.ai as an "enterprise studio for AI builders" at the Think conference.
IBM brings foundation models for text and code with Watsonx
According to IBM, Watsonx is the only AI tooling platform that offers a set of pre-trained, enterprise-specific models while providing a low-cost infrastructure. IBM is in direct competition with Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Nvidia, as well as startups like Anthropic and Cohere.
For Watsonx, IBM is partnering with AI startup Hugging Face, which hosts thousands of AI models, datasets and libraries. IBM's featured model families include fm.model.code (code generation), fm.model.NLP (large language models), and fm.model.geospatial, which was trained on NASA climate and remote sensing data.
The Foundation models can then be customized."We allow an enterprise to use their own code to adapt models to how they want to run their playbooks and their code," Arvind Krishna, the CEO of IBM, said.
Watsonx.ai, Watsonx.data & Watsonx.governance for the future of work
IBM itself uses the models, for example, in Watson Code Assistant, AIOps Insight, Watson Assistant, Watson Orchestrate, or EIS Builder Edition, a product that helps organizations develop solutions for environmental risk.
In addition to Watsonx.ai, IBM also announced Watsonx.data, a repository for controlled data and AI workloads, and Watsonx.governance, a toolkit with mechanisms to protect customer privacy, detect bias, and help organizations adhere to ethical standards.
IBM also introduced a new GPU offering optimized for compute-intensive AI workloads and the IBM Cloud Carbon Calculator, which helps track the carbon emissions of cloud applications.
The company believes AI could add $16 trillion in value to the global economy by 2030, and automate 30% of back-office operations within the next five years.
