- Releases a family of IBM Granite models into open source,
including its most capable and efficient Code LLMs that can
out-perform larger code models on many industry benchmarks
- Jointly with Red Hat, launches InstructLab, a
first-of-its-kind model alignment technique, to bring open-source
community contributions directly into LLMs
- Unveils new vision and momentum for new data and automation
capabilities; Accelerates generative AI infusion into IBM
assistants, automation, infrastructure, resource management
products and consulting services
- Strengthens collaborations with AWS, Adobe, Meta, Microsoft,
Mistral AI, Palo Alto Networks, SAP, Salesforce, and SDAIA to
expand capabilities and offer model choice, flexibility and
governance through watsonx
ARMONK,
N.Y., May 21, 2024 /CNW/ -- Today, at its annual
THINK conference, IBM (NYSE: IBM) announced several new updates to
its watsonx platform one year after its introduction, as well as
upcoming data and automation capabilities designed to make
artificial intelligence (AI) more open, cost effective, and
flexible for businesses. During his opening keynote, CEO
Arvind Krishna will share the
company's plans to invest in, build and contribute to the
open-source AI community as a core part of IBM's strategy.
"We firmly believe in bringing open innovation to AI. We want to
use the power of open source to do with AI what was successfully
done with Linux and OpenShift," said Krishna. "Open means choice.
Open means more eyes on the code, more minds on the problems, and
more hands on the solutions. For any technology to gain velocity
and become ubiquitous, you've got to balance three things:
competition, innovation, and safety. Open source is a great way to
achieve all three."
IBM released a family of Granite models into open source and
launched InstructLab, a first-of-its-kind capability, in
collaboration with Red Hat
Furthering its commitment to the open-source AI ecosystem, IBM
has now open sourced a family of its most advanced
and performant language and code Granite models. By open
sourcing these models, IBM is inviting clients, developers and
global experts to build on these strengths and push the boundaries
of what AI can achieve in enterprise environments.
Available today under Apache 2.0 licenses on Hugging Face and
GitHub, the open-source Granite models stand out for their
development process, quality, transparency and efficiency. The
Granite code models range from 3B to
34B parameters and come in both base
and instruction-following model variants, which are suitable for
tasks such as complex application modernization, code generation,
fixing bugs, explaining and documenting code, maintaining
repositories and more. The code models, trained on 116 programming
languages, consistently reach state-of-the-art performance among
open-source code LLMs across various code-related
tasksi:
- Testing by IBM found that the Granite Code models overall show
very strong performance across all model sizes and benchmarks,
often outperforming other open-source code models that are twice as
large compared to Granite.ii
- Testing by IBM on benchmarks including HumanEvalPack,
HumanEvalPlus, and reasoning benchmark GSM8K showed Granite code
models have strong performances on code synthesis, fixing,
explanation, editing, and translation across most major programming
languages, including Python, JavaScript, Java, Go, C++, and
Rust.iii
- The 20B parameter Granite base
code model was used to train IBM watsonx Code Assistant (WCA) for
specialized domains. It also powers watsonx Code Assistant for
Z — a product designed to help enterprises transform monolithic
COBOL applications into services optimized for IBM Z.
- The 20B parameter Granite base
code model was tuned to generate SQL from natural language
questions for the purpose of transforming structured data and
extracting insights from that data. IBM demonstrated leadership in
natural language to SQL, an important industry use case, as
benchmarked by BIRD's independent leaderboard, which ranks models
according to Execution Accuracy (EX) and Valid Efficiency Score
(VES).iv
IBM and Red Hat also recently launched InstructLab — a
revolutionary approach to advancing true open-source innovation
around LLMs.
The InstructLab methodology allows for continuous development of
base models through constant incremental contributions, much like
software development has worked in open source for decades. With
InstructLab, developers can build models specific to their business
domains or industries with their own data, so that they can see the
direct value of AI rather than just the model providers seeing the
value. IBM plans to harness these open-source contributions to
bring additional value to its clients through integrations with
watsonx.ai and the new Red Hat Enterprise Linux AI (RHEL AI)
solution.
RHEL AI comprises an enterprise-ready version of the
InstructLab, IBM's open-source Granite models, and the world's
leading enterprise Linux platform to simplify AI deployment across
hybrid infrastructure environments. Read this blog to learn more
about Instruct Lab and watsonx.ai.
IBM Consulting is also launching a practice to help clients
leverage InstructLab with their own proprietary data to train
purpose-specific AI models that can be scaled to better fit the
cost and performance requirements of an enterprise's business
needs. Read this blog to learn more about how IBM Consulting is
helping enterprises adopt AI.
IBM unveils a new class of watsonx assistants
This new wave of AI innovation has the potential to unlock an
estimated $4 trillion in annual
economic benefits across industries.v However,
IBM's annual Global AI Adoption Index recently found that while 42%
of enterprise-scale companies (> 1,000 employees) surveyed have
implemented AI in their business, another 40% of those companies
that are exploring or experimenting with AI have yet to deploy
their models. For the companies stuck in the sandbox, 2024 is the
year of overcoming barriers to entry such as the skills gap, data
complexity and – perhaps most importantly – trust.
To address these challenges, IBM is announcing several upcoming
updates and enhancements to its family of watsonx assistants, along
with an upcoming capability in watsonx Orchestrate to help clients
build their own AI Assistants across domains.
The new AI Assistants include watsonx Code Assistant for
Enterprise Java Applications (planned availability in October 2024), watsonx Assistant for Z to
transform how users interact with the system to quickly transfer
knowledge and expertise (planned availability in June 2024), and an expansion of watsonx Code
Assistant for Z Service with code explanation to help clients
understand and document applications through natural language
(planned availability in June 2024).
Read more on watsonx Code Assistant for Enterprise Java
Applications, watsonx Assistant for Z, and Watsonx Code
Assistant for Z.
IBM is expanding its NVIDIA GPU offerings to now offer NVIDIA
L40S and NVIDIA L4 Tensor Core GPUs, as well as support for Red Hat
Enterprise Linux AI (RHEL AI) and OpenShift AI to help enterprises
and developers address the needs of AI and other mission-critical
workloads. Additionally, to help clients accelerate time to value
for AI, IBM is using deployable architectures for watsonx to enable
quick AI deployment while empowering enterprises with security and
compliance capabilities to help them protect their data and manage
compliance controls. Read this blog to learn more about IBM
Cloud capabilities.
Additionally, IBM has announced several new and upcoming
generative AI powered data products and capabilities to augment how
organizations observe, govern, and optimize their increasingly
robust and complex data for AI workloads. Learn more about the
upcoming IBM Data Product Hub (planned availability in
June 2024), Data Gate for watsonx
(planned availability in June 2024),
and a host of the latest and planned updates on watsonx.data.
Read this blog to learn more about these data capabilities.
IBM previews new vision and capabilities for AI-powered
automation
Hybrid cloud and AI are transforming how companies do business.
The average enterprise today manages multiple cloud environments —
public and private — and around 1,000 apps,vi each
with multiple dependencies. They also deal with petabytes of data.
With generative AI expected to drive up to 1 billion apps by
2028,vii automation is no longer an option – it is how
businesses will save time, solve problems, and make decisions
faster.
IBM is addressing these challenges by delivering a set of
AI-powered automation capabilities that will allow CIOs to move
from proactive management of their IT environments to AI-powered
predictive automation. AI-powered automation will be an essential
tool for driving the speed, performance, scalability, security,
cost efficiency of an enterprise's infrastructure.
Today, IBM's portfolio of automation, networking, data,
application, and infrastructure management products help businesses
manage their increasingly complex IT environments. For technology
business management, Apptio enables organizations to make informed,
data-driven decisions about their investments by driving clarity on
technology spend and how it drives business value — enabling
organizations to quickly respond to changing market conditions.
Clients can also combine Apptio with the power of Instana for
automated observability and Turbonomic for performance optimization
to help clients efficiently allocate resources and control IT spend
through enhanced visibility and real-time insights,
allowing them to focus more time on deploying and scaling AI
to drive new innovative initiatives.
To complement these products, IBM recently announced its intent
to acquire HashiCorp, which helps organizations automate
multi-cloud and hybrid environments with Infrastructure Lifecycle
Management and Security Lifecycle Management with products
including Terraform, Vault and others. With HashiCorp, clients can
easily move to and operate across multi-cloud and hybrid cloud
environments.
Now, at THINK, IBM is continuing to advance its state-of-the-art
in automation portfolio by previewing a new generative AI-powered
tool called IBM Concert, which will be generally available in
June 2024. IBM Concert will serve as
the 'nerve center' of an enterprise's technology and
operations.
Powered by AI from watsonx, IBM Concert will provide generative
AI-driven insights across clients' portfolios of applications to
identify, predict, and suggest fixes for problems. The new tool
integrates into clients' existing systems, using generative AI to
connect with data from their cloud infrastructure, source
repositories, CI/CD pipelines and other existing application
management solutions to build out a detailed view of their
connected applications.
By allowing clients to eliminate unnecessary tasks and
accelerate others, Concert is designed to make teams more informed
so they can be fast and responsive in addressing issues and solving
problems before they happen. Concert will initially focus on
helping application owners, SREs and IT leaders gain insights
about, pre-empt and more quickly address issues around application
risk and compliance management. Read this blog to learn more
about IBM Concert.
IBM expands ecosystem access to watsonx, adds third-party
models
IBM continues to foster a strong ecosystem of partners to offer
clients choice and flexibility through bringing third-party models
onto watsonx, enabling leading software companies to embed watsonx
capabilities into their technologies, and offering IBM Consulting
expertise for enterprise business transformation. IBM Consulting
has rapidly expanded its global generative AI expertise, with more
than 50,000 practitioners certified in IBM and strategic partner
technologies. Our ecosystem of partners, large and small, are
helping clients adopt and scale tailored AI across their
businesses.
- AWS: IBM and AWS are partnering to bring together Amazon
SageMaker and watsonx.governance on AWS. Available now, this
product will equip Amazon SageMaker clients with advanced AI
governance capabilities for their predictive machine learning and
generative AI models. Clients can now govern, monitor, and manage
their models across platforms, simplifying risk management and
compliance processes for their AI operations.
- Adobe: IBM and Adobe are collaborating on hybrid cloud
and AI, bringing Red Hat OpenShift and watsonx to Adobe Experience
Platform and are exploring making watsonx.ai and Adobe Acrobat AI
Assistant available on-prem and private cloud. IBM is also
introducing a new consulting service to advance client adoption of
Adobe Express. These capabilities are expected to become available
in 2H24.
- Meta: IBM has announced the availability of Meta Llama 3
— the next generation of Meta's open large language model — on
watsonx to help enterprises innovate on their AI journeys. The
addition of Llama 3 builds on IBM's collaboration with Meta to
advance open innovation for AI. The two companies launched the AI
Alliance — a group of leading organizations across industry,
startup, academia, research and government — late last year, and it
has since grown to more than 100 members and collaborators.
- Microsoft: IBM is announcing that the watsonx AI
and data platform is supported by IBM to run on Microsoft Azure and
available to purchase through IBM and our business partner
ecosystem as a customer-managed solution on Azure Red Hat OpenShift
(ARO).
- Mistral: IBM is announcing its intent to create a new
strategic partnership with Mistral AI to bring its latest
commercial models to the watsonx platform, including the leading
Mistral Large model, which the company plans to make available in
2Q24. IBM looks forward collaborating with Mistral AI on open
innovation, building on both companies' work in the open-source
community.
- Palo Alto Networks: IBM has expanded its partnership
with Palo Alto to jointly deliver AI-powered security offerings and
several initiatives to improve security outcomes for clients. For
more, read the full press release.
- Salesforce: IBM and Salesforce are exploring making the
IBM Granite model series available later this year for use across
the Salesforce Einstein 1 platform, with the aim to provide clients
access to more models to enhance decision making for AI CRM use
cases.
- SAP: IBM Consulting and SAP are also collaborating to
find ways to help more customers accelerate their cloud journeys
leveraging RISE with SAP so they can realize the transformative
benefits of generative AI for business in the cloud. This work
seeks to expand on IBM and SAP's collaboration around embedding IBM
Watson AI technology into SAP solutions. As part of this initiative
with SAP, the IBM Granite Model Series is expected to be
accessible for use across SAP's portfolio of cloud solutions and
applications – which is underpinned by the generative AI hub in SAP
AI Core.
- SDAIA: IBM has launched the Saudi Data and Artificial
Intelligence Authority (SDAIA) 'ALLaM' Arabic model on watsonx,
adding new language capabilities to the platform, including the
ability to understand multiple Arabic dialects.
To see all THINK news, visit the IBM Newsroom.
Access a suite of social assets to share across your business
and personal channels with our creative toolkit.
Media Contact:
Amy Angelini
alangeli@us.ibm.com
To read IBM recent client & partner testimonials, see
below:
Broadridge Financial: Leveraging Generative AI to Transform
Financial Services
"As a trusted global technology partner sitting at the intersection
of financial services, application sustainability and advancement
is critical to our business strategy to safely and confidently
embrace new technologies and deliver advanced services to clients
to help them better operate, innovate, and grow," said Tyler Derr, CTO, Broadridge Financial Solutions.
"Working with IBM, we are looking for ways to leverage AI to
improve developer experience and productivity and to help
understand and document our existing environments."
Casper Labs: Responsible AI Scaling with Blockchain-Enabled
Data Governance Solution
"Trustworthy data is key to realizing AI's full potential,
particularly in the current regulatory climate," said Mrinal
Manohar, CEO at Casper Labs. "Without visibility into data flows,
enterprises face unacceptable levels of risk, including
intellectual property crossover and unnecessary data sharing across
organizational lines. As an ecosystem partner, we're working with
IBM Consulting to create Prove AI, a blockchain-enabled governance
solution that pairs our tamper-resistant, highly serialized ledger
with IBM watsonx.governance to provide enterprises with an
end-to-end AI and data management platform that can safeguard
sensitive data and ensure version control."
Department for Work and Pensions: Transforming Service
Delivery with Generative AI
"As the UK's largest public
service department, we're using the power of generative AI to make
a positive impact on the lives of the millions of citizens we serve
every day," said Rich Corbridge,
Director General and Chief Digital Information Officer, Department
for Work and Pensions. "Our collaboration with IBM is instrumental
in helping us identify and test the most promising AI use cases,
build a robust partner ecosystem, develop innovative governance and
risk management approaches, and cultivate the skills needed to
scale generative AI successfully across the Department." He added,
"At the heart of our approach are human-centred values, while
maintaining a forward-looking focus. We prioritise creating
simplified, reusable components which we are building through our
partnership with IBM. Together, DWP and IBM are transforming the
support systems the UK's most vulnerable people interact with every
single day."
Dun & Bradstreet: AI Adoption with Trusted Data and
Co-Created Solutions
"Enterprises need partners who can help
them scale AI adoption, which starts with trusted data," said
Gary Kotovets, Chief Data &
Analytics Officer at Dun & Bradstreet. "We're bringing together
Dun & Bradstreet and IBM's nearly 300 years of combined
experience to create generative AI solutions that harness Dun &
Bradstreet Data Cloud and IBM watsonx to fuel generative AI
adoption, starting with Ask Procurement. By leveraging IBM watsonx,
D&B Ask Procurement simplifies, accelerates, and reduces the
cost of certain essential procurement decisions. Ask Procurement is
just one of many examples of how, together, we can help clients
drive savings, optimize business processes, and improve risk
management with generative AI and reliable data."
Elevance Health: Driving an AI-first Digital-first Experience
in Healthcare Customer Service
"Elevance Health's purpose is to improve the health of humanity. We
have the privilege of serving over 117M people, and are dedicated to making
healthcare more proactive, predictive and personalized," said
Kumar Gudavalli, Tech Strategy Lead
& Chief Architect, Elevance Health. "Our longstanding and
trusted relationship with IBM Consulting and the capabilities of
IBM watsonx Assistant have helped us achieve both great member and
provider experience and strong business outcomes. Driving an
AI-first Digital-first experience, we were able to move up a third
of interactions to messaging, and AI handles complex healthcare
interactions with 60% effectiveness, while delivering much
higher customer satisfaction and first contact
resolution."
Medtronic: IBM, Microsoft and Medtronic Drive AI-Powered
Automation
"We are so fortunate to live in a time of limitless potential, a
time where we can experience first-hand the power of collaboration.
Together with IBM and Microsoft, we are transforming challenges
into groundbreaking analytics solutions, setting new industry
standards through innovation and excellence," said Luciano Miranda, Vice President, Advanced
Analytics Global Operations & Supply Chain at Medtronic.
Sevilla FC: Scouting Reimagined with AI-powered
Insights
"At Sevilla FC, we're proud to be at the forefront of innovation in
football, and our engagement with IBM is a testament to that
commitment," said José María del Nido
Carrasco, Sevilla FC's President. "Our team of 20+ expert
scouts, former players and coaches, have curated a treasure trove
of 400,000 player-game reports and 200,000 scouting notes, and now
using IBM watsonx, we can unlock the full potential of this data,
combining human insight with AI-driven analysis to make more
informed, data-driven recruitment decisions. This game-changing
work with IBM is a bold step forward in the future of football
scouting."
Virgin Money wins 'Best application of AI in Financial
Services'
"A year ago, we launched Redi, our Microsoft
AI-powered virtual assistant, and we're thrilled to see over a
million of our credit card customers engaging with this innovative
technology," said Adam Paice, Head
of Digital, Proposition Virgin Money. "Our customers rave about
their interactions with Redi in our Credit Card app, and we believe
that's because we are creating digital experiences for them that
are as useful as they are delightful. Our collaboration with IBM
Consulting has been instrumental in helping us unlock the full
potential of generative AI, striking the perfect balance between
innovation and control."
Westfield Insurance Boosts Developer Productivity by 80%
during pilot
"As a leading provider of property casualty
insurance, we rely on advanced technology to help balance
ever-changing regulations and economic uncertainties. Our goal is
to meet customer service expectations while navigating these
complexities," said Don Hurrle, IT
Infrastructure, AI, and Agile Transformation Leader, Westfield Insurance. "During an eight-week pilot
with IBM, we used watsonx deployed on IBM Cloud to simplify the
explanation and documentation of code faster, resulting in an
80%-time reduction for a developer to understand an application.
This significant time savings enables our developers to focus on
higher-value tasks, improving overall productivity. IBM watsonx
Code Assistant for Z also accelerated the understanding of the
application by performing analysis, generating reports, and
identifying the impact of code changes."
Statements regarding IBM's future direction and intent are
subject to change or withdrawal without notice and represent goals
and objectives only.
About IBM
IBM is a leading provider of global hybrid
cloud and AI, and consulting expertise. We help clients in more
than 175 countries capitalize on insights from their data,
streamline business processes, reduce costs and gain the
competitive edge in their industries. More than 4,000 government
and corporate entities in critical infrastructure areas such as
financial services, telecommunications and healthcare rely on IBM's
hybrid cloud platform and Red Hat OpenShift to affect their digital
transformations quickly, efficiently and securely. IBM's
breakthrough innovations in AI, quantum computing,
industry-specific cloud solutions and consulting deliver open and
flexible options to our clients. All of this is backed by IBM's
long-standing commitment to trust, transparency, responsibility,
inclusivity and service. Visit www.ibm.com for more
information.
___________________________
|
i IBM. "Granite Code Models: A
Family of Open Foundation Models for Code Intelligence"
|
ii
IBM. "Granite Code Models: A Family of Open Foundation Models for
Code Intelligence"
|
iii
IBM. "Granite Code Models: A Family of Open Foundation Models for
Code Intelligence"
|
iv For data-centric enterprise
workloads, generating SQL from natural language questions is one of
the most significant and challenging code generation tasks. On May
14, 2024, IBM Granite-based models achieved the top accuracy and
efficiency scores on the BIRD ( (BIg Bench for LaRge-scale Database
Grounded Text-to-SQL Evaluation) leaderboard for text-to-SQL
generation, demonstrating IBM's leadership in this critical
enterprise use case.
|
v McKinsey. "The Economic
Potential of Generative AI."
|
vi Salesforce. "Third Edition
State of IT Report."
|
vii
IDC: Gary Chen, Jim Mercer. "1 Billion New Logical Applications:
More Background."
|
Contact: Amy Angelini, alangeli@us.ibm.com
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