In a race to remain relevant in the artificial intelligence (AI) realm and to seek an edge over the competitors, International Business Machines (IBM) Tuesday announced an AI-based data platform Watsonx, to assist companies to incorporate the technology in their businesses, reported Reuters.
The announcement of a new AI platform comes after a decade when IBM’s Watson software drew attention for winning the game show Jeopardy.
At that time the New York-based company had said: “Watson could ‘learn’ and process human language.” However, the high cost associated with Watson made it difficult for companies to use.
After the launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT — a human-like chatbot — the competition of incorporating AI into products has gained the attention of tech giants who are opting for doing business in new ways.
IBM CEO Arvind Krishna told Reuters ahead of the company’s annual Think conference: “This time, the lower cost of implementing the large language AI models means the chances of success are high.”
Krishna said: “When something becomes 100 times cheaper, it really sets up an attraction that’s very, very different.”
“The first barrier to creating 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.”
AI could reduce certain back-office jobs at IBM in the coming years. “That doesn’t mean the total employment decreases,” he said while referring to the media reports mentioning that IBM is ceasing its hiring process that could be taken over by AI.
“That gives the ability to plow a lot more investment into value-creating activities…We hired more people than were let go because we’re hiring into areas where there is a lot more demand from our clients,” he noted.
He also added that “IBM was also embracing a more open ecosystem and partnering with open-source AI software development hub Hugging Face and others.”
IBM said: “Companies can use the Watsonx platform to train and deploy AI models, automatically generate code using natural language and use various large language models built for different purposes such as chemical creation or climate change modelling.”