IBM’s Watsonx AI platform makes integration and deployment more accessible.
International Business Machines Corp. introduced Watsonx on Tuesday, a new artificial intelligence and data platform designed to help businesses integrate AI into their operations.
The debut of the new AI platform comes more than a decade after IBM’s Watson supercomputer gained fame for winning the game show Jeopardy. Watson could “learn” and process human language, according to IBM at the time. However, according to Reuters, Watson’s high cost at the time made it difficult for businesses to use. After a decade, the chatbot ChatGPT’s sudden success has made AI adoption at organizations a priority, and IBM is seeking for new business. This time, the decreased cost of creating large language AI models means that the prospects of success are strong, according to IBM CEO Arvind Krishna, ahead of the company’s annual Think conference.
“When something becomes 100 times cheaper, it creates a very, very different attraction,” Krishna explained. “The first barrier is creating the model, but once that’s done, adapting that model for a hundred or a thousand different tasks is very easy and can be done by a non-expert.”
According to Krishna, AI could eliminate certain back-office employment at IBM in the future years. “That doesn’t mean total employment decreases,” he said, referring to claims in the media about IBM halting hiring for thousands of jobs that AI could replace.
“This allows us to invest significantly more in value-creating initiatives…We hired more individuals than we let go since we’re hiring in high-demand areas from our clients. He added that IBM was also embracing a more open ecosystem and partnering with open-source AI software development hub Hugging Face and others.
Companies may use the Watsonx platform to train and deploy AI models, automatically produce code using natural language, and employ multiple huge language models built for various objectives such as chemical production or climate change modelling, according to IBM.
