International Business Machines (IBM) on Tuesday launched watsonx, a new artificial intelligence and data platform to help companies integrate AI into their businesses.
The launch of the new AI platform comes more than a decade after IBM’s software, called Watson, gained prominence after winning the game show Jeopardy. IBM said at the time that Watson could “learn” and process human language. But Watson’s high cost at the time made it difficult for companies to use, according to a Reuters report.
Fast-forward 10 years, and the overnight success of the chatbot ChatGPT has highlighted the adoption of AI in the enterprise, and IBM looks to win new business. This time, the low cost of implementing language AI models at scale means a higher chance of success, IBM CEO Arvind Krishna told Reuters ahead of the company’s annual Think conference. told to
“When something is 100 times cheaper, it has a very different appeal,” said Krishna. “The initial barrier to creating a model is high, but once created, adapting that model to hundreds or thousands of different tasks is very easy and can be done by non-experts. .”
Krishna said AI could reduce the work of certain back-office jobs at IBM in the next few years. “That doesn’t mean that jobs overall will decline,” he said, referring to some media reports saying IBM has suspended hiring of thousands of jobs that could be replaced by AI. said.
“This allows us to put more investment into our value creation activities…We hired more people than we laid off because we are hiring in areas where client demand is high.”
He added that IBM is embracing a more open ecosystem, partnering with the likes of Hugging Face, an open source AI software development hub.
According to IBM, companies will use the watsonx platform to train and deploy AI models, automatically generating code using natural language, for a variety of purposes, including chemical production and climate change modeling. You can use a variety of large-scale language models built on
