IBM has unveiled its latest AI and data platform, Watsonx, designed to enable enterprises to leverage advanced AI capabilities with trusted data at scale. As businesses increasingly turn to AI, they require a comprehensive technology stack that allows them to train, fine-tune, and deploy AI models across their organization, ensuring speed, governance, and compatibility with any cloud environment.
Watsonx offers a range of features and products to empower businesses in their AI journey. The platform includes an AI development studio, a data store, and an AI governance toolkit. These components work together seamlessly, providing an end-to-end AI workflow that facilitates easy adaptation and scalability of AI models.
The AI development studio, known as Watsonx.ai, is expected to be available in July 2023. It enables AI builders to train, test, tune, and deploy both traditional machine learning models and new generative AI capabilities powered by foundation models. The studio offers a variety of foundation models, training and tuning tools, and cost-effective infrastructure to support the entire AI lifecycle, from data preparation to model deployment and monitoring.
One of the key highlights of Watsonx.ai is the foundation model library, which provides users with access to IBM-curated and trained foundation models. These models are trained on a wide range of data modalities, including language, code, time-series data, tabular data, geospatial data, and IT events data. By leveraging these models, businesses can automate IT tasks, generate code, analyze geospatial data, and much more.
IBM has also formed a collaboration with Hugging Face, a leader in open-source AI models, to bring the best of open-source AI models to the enterprise on the watsonx platform. This partnership ensures that businesses can leverage thousands of Hugging Face’s open models and datasets, allowing them to choose the most suitable models and architecture for their specific needs.
In addition to the AI development studio, Watsonx comprises Watsonx.data and Watsonx.governance. Watsonx.data is a fit-for-purpose data store built on an open lakehouse architecture, optimized for governed data and AI workloads. It enables organizations to access and share data through multiple fit-for-purpose query engines, providing valuable insights while ensuring governance and data privacy.
Watsonx.governance is an AI governance toolkit that facilitates trusted AI workflows. It mitigates risks associated with manual processes, protects customer privacy, detects model bias and drift, and helps organizations adhere to ethical standards. This toolkit ensures transparency, explainability, and accountability in AI systems, enabling businesses to deploy AI with confidence.
IBM plans to integrate watsonx.ai foundation models across its major software products. For example, Watson Code Assistant will leverage generative AI to enable developers to generate code using simple English language commands. AIOps Insights will utilize foundation models for code and natural language processing to enhance performance visibility and incident resolution in IT environments. Watson Assistant and Watson Orchestrate will be combined with an NLP foundation model to enhance employee productivity and customer service experiences. Moreover, the Environmental Intelligence Suite will utilize the geospatial foundation model to help organizations address environmental risks and achieve their sustainability goals.
To support the adoption of AI, IBM is also introducing new offerings. These include a GPU-as-a-service infrastructure on IBM Cloud, tailored for training and serving foundation models, and an AI-informed dashboard called IBM Cloud Carbon Calculator, which allows clients to measure and manage their carbon emissions associated with their multi-cloud journey. Furthermore, IBM Consulting has established a Center of Excellence for generative AI, boasting over 1,000 AI experts who will build and deploy watsonx for clients, leveraging IBM Watson and a portfolio of ecosystem partners.