IBM Updates Watsonx With Open Source And Product Capabilities To Drive Enterprise AI

IBM has announced new updates to its artificial intelligence and data platform watsonx, as well as upcoming data and automation capabilities designed to make AI more open, cost-effective and flexible for businesses.

The company has open-sourced a family of its IBM Granite language and code models, allowing enterprises, developers and experts to explore what AI can achieve in enterprise environments.

Available under Apache 2.0 licenses on Hugging Face and GitHub, the Granite code models range from 3B to 34B parameters, and come in both base and instruction-following model variants. These are suitable for tasks such as application modernisation, code generation, fixing bugs, explaining and documenting code, and maintaining repositories.

“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,” said IBM CEO Arvind Krishna. “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.”

IBM has also strengthened collaborations with companies such as AWS, Adobe, Meta, Microsoft, Mistral AI, Palo Alto Networks, SAP and Salesforce to bring third-party models onto watsonx. This is aimed at expanding watsonx’s capabilities and offering model choice, flexibility and governance to enterprises.

InstructLab Launch

Jointly with Red Hat, IBM has also launched InstructLab, a model alignment technique to bring open-source community contributions directly into large language models. The methodology allows for development of base models through constant incremental contributions, much like software development has worked in open source for decades. With InstructLab, developers can build models specific to their business domains or industries with their own data.

Also, the new Red Hat Enterprise Linux AI comprises an enterprise-ready version of InstructLab and enterprise Linux platform to simplify AI deployment across hybrid infrastructure environments. IBM Consulting is also launching a practice to help enterprises leverage InstructLab with their own proprietary data to train AI models as per their business need.

New Watsonx Assistants

IBM has introduced several improvements to its family of watsonx assistants, along with an upcoming capability in watsonx Orchestrate to help enterprises build their own AI assistants. The new AI assistants include Code Assistant for Enterprise Java Applications, Assistant for Z to improve how users interact with the system, and an expansion of Code Assistant for Z Service with code explanation to help users understand and document applications through natural language.

IBM said it is expanding its Nvidia GPU offerings to now offer L40S and L4 Tensor Core GPUs, as well as support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux AI and OpenShift AI to help enterprises and developers address the needs of AI and other critical workloads.

AI-Powered Automation

To help manage the challenges of multiple cloud environments and petabytes of data, IBM has introduced a set of capabilities that will enable a shift from proactive management of IT environments to AI-powered predictive automation. AI-powered automation is aimed at driving the speed, performance, scalability, security and cost-efficiency of an enterprise's infrastructure.

Through a portfolio of automation, networking, data, application and infrastructure management products, IBM aims to help businesses better manage their complex IT environments.

To complement these products, IBM had announced its intent to acquire HashiCorp, which helps organisations automate multi-cloud and hybrid environments.