IBM Previews Enhanced Version of WatsonX AI Platform

IBM says it is releasing new enhancements to watsonx, its artificial intelligence (AI) platform.

The enhancements, announced Thursday (Sept. 7), include “a technical preview for watsonx.governance, new generative AI data services coming to watsonx.data, and the planned integration of watsonx.ai foundation models across select software and infrastructure products,” the company said in a news release.

According to the release, developers will be able to access many of these new capabilities and models next week at the company’s TechXchange event in Las Vegas.

The company’s new generative AI models for watsonx.ai include its “Granite” series, set to debut later this month.

Granite models use the “Decoder” architecture, which “underpins the ability of today’s large language models (LLMs) to predict the next word in a sequence, and can support enterprise NLP tasks, such as summarization, content generation and insight extraction,” IBM said.

In addition, the company is now offering Meta’s Llama 2-chat 70 billion parameter model as well as the StarCoder LLM for code generation in watsonx.ai on IBM Cloud.

IBM introduced watsonx in May, with CEO Arvind Krishna saying it was designed for clients to become “AI advantaged.” 

“With IBM watsonx, clients can quickly train and deploy custom AI capabilities across their entire business, all while retaining full control of their data,” the CEO said. 

Watson shares its name with IBM’s earlier attempt at an AI model, one that could learn and process human language, but whose high cost made it difficult for companies to incorporate.

“When something becomes 100 times cheaper, it really sets up an attraction that’s very, very different,” Krishna told Reuters in May. 

“The first barrier to create the model is high, but once you’ve done that, to adapt that model for a hundred or a thousand different tasks is very easy and can be done by a non-expert,” Krishna added. 

Last week, IBM announced it was working with Salesforce to help clients adopt AI for customer relationship management while protecting their data.

“We see how the need to increase employee productivity while simultaneously elevating the customer experience with speed, personalization and convenience has surged exponentially,” Matt Candy, IBM Consulting’s global managing partner for generative AI, said in a news release.

The partnership, added Candy, can “help empower enterprise clients to scale and accelerate the adoption of generative AI that will support them to meet their business needs.”