IIBM Published its generative AI Platform A new update to WatsonX includes new assistant tools, third-party models, and a broader commitment to open source AI.
At its annual Think conference, IBM announced a shift in focus to open source, and has made its Granite series of large language models open source, meaning that enterprises can use them to power their commercial applications.
These new open source models include a powerful coding model that developers can use to perform bug fixes, generate code, and maintain code bases across 116 programming languages. Watsonx, but IBM announced at the Think conference that it hopes companies can use these models to "expand the boundaries of AI in enterprise environments."
Watsonx is also getting new AI assistant tools to improve user workflows. The new assistants include Watsonx Code Assistant for Enterprise Java Applications and Watsonx Code Assistant for Mainframe Applications. These new code generation assistants are designed to help increase the productivity of business developers, helping them improve code quality and simplify their workloads by automating tasks such as application remediation. Watsonx will also launch a new feature that allows users to build their own AI assistants. This feature is coming soon to Watsonx Orchestrate, which will enable users to customize their own assistants for their specific markets.
Additionally, IBM announced the expansion of its GPU offering to cover Nvidia’s L40S and L4Tensor Core GPUs, giving WatsonX users access to powerful hardware to handle their workloads. Enterprises can also benefit from expanded support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux AI (RHEL AI) and OpenShift AI to support their AI workloads.
In addition to Granite, which is now open source, WatsonX users can access a range of AI models, including StarCoder and Meta's Llama2. At the Think conference, IBM announced that more third-party models will be added to the platform, including Meta's Llama3. The platform now also includes ALLaM, a language model focused on Arabic, and Mistral AI's large model. Users can choose from a variety of models to run their applications.
In addition, the platform is also expanding in partnership with other vendors, including AWS, where IBM’s Watsonx.governance tool will be available to Amazon SageMaker users, enabling them to monitor and manage AI tools to address risk and compliance issues. Adobe is also working with IBM to bring Red Hat OpenShift and Watsonx to Adobe Experience Platform, allowing users to use IBM’s AI capabilities in IBM’s design platform.