IBM Joins AI Bandwagon with WatsonX
Generative AI is the flavor of the season and IBM has now announced that its new WatsonX is the right platform to create AI-based models
The generative AI market is going crazy with pretty much the entire Big Tech universe and their not-so-entitled poorer cousins going after it. Now, IBM has joined this ever-growing bandwagon, claiming that its new platform Watsonx would deliver tools to build AI models and provide access to pretrained models to generate everything from text to computer code and beyond.
They made this big announcement at the Think Conference, which some felt was not the right thing to do as IBM’s back-office managers had recently been asked to pause hiring for roles that could be replaced by AI-based systems in the years ahead. A report published by TechCrunch quoted chief commercial officer Rob Thomas as saying that AI won’t replace managers but those that use AI will replace those that do not.
The company, of course, clarified that the focus on AI was largely driven by business challenges of prospects who sought to deploy AI within their respective workplaces. A survey by IBM showed that 30% of business leaders cited trust and transparency as barriers holding them back from its adoption while 42% had privacy concerns.
Providing customers with an AI-build set of tools
Which is where IBM is confident of WatsonX’s capabilities. Officials said customers will get a toolset, infrastructure and consulting resources required to create their own AI models or fine-tune and adapt those available around. Which is probably why the company describes the platform as the “enterprise studio for AI builders.”
The platform can also be used to validate and deploy models besides monitoring them thereafter and also consolidate their workflows at a future date. So, how does IBM plan to differentiate themselves from Google, Microsoft and Amazon who too have something similar to offer at some level or the other?
How is IBM differentiating itself from others in play?
Yes, we are talking about Sagemaker Studio, Vertex AI and the Azure AI Platform. For the moment, IBM likes to believe that WatsonX is the only AI tooling platform in the market that provides the whole gamut of pre-trained, developed enterprise models and cost-effective infrastructure that can help businesses adopt artificial intelligence easier and cheaper.
Dario Gil, SVP at IBM was clear that one would require a very large organization and team to be able to bring AI innovation in a way that enterprises can consume. And that’s the key element of the horizontal capabilities the company claims to be bringing to the customers. Of course, the efficacy of WatsonX would surface over the next few months.
The focus is around seven pre-trained models
On its part, IBM offers seven pretrained models to businesses using Watsonx.ai, a few of which are open source. They’ve partnered with Hugging Face, an AI startup that develops models, datasets and libraries. The company is highlighting three of these, viz., fm.model.code, which generates code; fm.model.NLP, a collection of large language models; and fm.model.geospatial, a model built on climate and remote sensing data from NASA.
The company claims that these models are differentiated by a training dataset containing multiple types of business data, including code, time-series data, tabular data and geospatial data and IT events data. IBM CEO Arvind Krishna, says the company allows an enterprise to use their own code to adapt these models to how they want to run the playbooks and their code.
But, that’s not all. Alongside the platform, IBM also unveiled WatsonX.data – a fit-for-purpose data store designed for both governed data and AI workloads. The solution allows users to access data through a single point of entry while applying query engines. The company also promises governance, automation and integrations with existing databases and tools.
The company also showcased a new GPU offering in the IBM cloud optimized for compute-intensive workloads, specifically revolving around training and serving AI models. It also showed off the IBM Cloud Carbon Calculator, an AI-based dashboard that enables customers to measure, track, manage and help report carbon emissions generated through their cloud usage patterns.
