Watsonx – new artificial intelligence and data platform launched by IBM

Watsonx will help companies to integrate artificial intelligence (AI) solutions into their business processes.

Watsonx is a new AI platform from IBM. Image credit: Open Grid Scheduler via Flickr, CC0

The news about the introduction of the new platform powered by artificial intelligence technologies and offering AI-related solutions was announced by IBM on Tuesday.

The new AI and data platform is called Watsonx. According to the developer, its primary purpose is to assist businesses in integrating AI into their operations.

IBM’s watsonx platform is intended to enable companies to train and deploy AI models, automatically generate code using natural language, and utilize various large language models designed for different purposes, such as chemical creation or climate change modeling. The new service will span all stages of the AI product lifecycle, including data preparation, model development, deployment, as well as monitoring of outcomes.

The company also states that it is seeking to create a more open ecosystem. The first round is creating new partnerships, such as their collaboration with open-source AI software development hub Hugging Face.

This new AI platform launch comes more than ten years after IBM’s Watson software achieved global fame for winning the game show Jeopardy by “learning”, processing human language, and generating highly relevant responses. But at the time, it was too expensive for most real-world applications, making it challenging for companies to use due to economic constraints and lack of prior positive experience of using machine learning and AI in their business processes.

However, the recent rapid success of ChatGPT in AI adoption at companies and the proliferation of similar alternative platforms led IBM to rethink the current situation in terms of new business opportunities, which ultimately led to Watsonx.

The current costs of implementing so-called large language AI models are relatively low compared to what the world had just several years ago. With this in mind, the chances of success are high, said IBM CEO Arvind Krishna in an interview with Reuters.

“When something becomes 100 times cheaper, it really sets up an attraction that’s very, very different. The first barrier to create 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,” said Arvid Krishna.

IBM CEO also commented that IBM itself would have to face a shift in its internal job structure due to emergence of advanced AI technologies. But at the same time, their aim is to keep the total employment stable and even growing by investing more in value-creating activities. 

You can offer your link to a page which is relevant to the topic of this post.