IBM Introduces Watsonx To Streamline Enterprise AI Development
Watsonx is a reimagined application of IBM’s previously unsuccessful AI prowess.
- IBM launched Watsonx, a reimagined application of its previously unsuccessful AI prowess.
- The company pegs Watsonx as an AI development studio, complete with thousands of open-source models as well as IBM-curated and trained foundation AI models.
This week, IBM reinvigorated its existing foray into AI by launching multiple AI-driven products, chiefly IBM Watsonx, at the company’s annual Think conference. With Watsonx, the company seeks to enable organizations to build respective AI models and help integrate them across their systems.
IBM Watson was the company’s cognitive computing project whose success primarily lay in beating humans at Jeopardy. The company pivoted the AI tool for the healthcare industry for AI-assisted diagnosis and treatment but found little success. IBM then put it up for sale for $1 billion against its $4 billion investment.
Big Blue is now ushering in a broader shift in business strategy on AI and refocusing its energy on capitalizing on the ChatGPT-driven boom in demand for AI products.
“When something becomes 100 times cheaper, it really sets up an attraction that’s very, very different,” said IBM chairman and CEO Arvind Krishna. “The first barrier to creating 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.”
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IBM Brands Watsonx as an AI Development Studio
IBM is promoting Watsonx as an AI development studio, complete with thousands of open-source models as well as IBM-curated and trained foundation AI models. IBM-developed models are trained on language, code, time-series, tabular, geospatial, and IT events data.
It also features AI-generated code, an AI governance toolkit for streamlined workflows, and more. IBM said the solution is designed to “train, test, tune, and deploy both traditional machine learning and new generative AI capabilities.”
Clients thus have the option to leverage said technology stack and models as they are, customize them according to their needs with their data, or create their models from scratch. Simply, IBM Watsonx is like a preset canvas that companies can fill with data to create bespoke models.
“We allow an enterprise to use their own code to adapt the model to how they want to run their playbooks and their code,” Krishna said. “Then they can deploy it for themselves without any danger of their code leaking.”
Amazon maintains a presence in the AI development domain with SageMaker Studio, Microsoft has Azure AI Platform, Google has Vertex AI, and NVIDIA recently launched AI Foundations. IBM Watsonx is expected to be generally available by July 2023.
IBM also announced a GPU-as-a-service cloud offering to cater to AI-intensive workloads.
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