What IBM Watsonx is and How it Can Enable a New Era of AI for Business

Everybody is talking about generative AI – sometimes with a mix of excitement and anxiety but few doubt that the advances we are seeing represent a huge opportunity for those that act quickly — and strategically. So what is generative AI? Generative AI refers to deep-learning models that can generate high-quality text, images, and other content based on the data they were trained on.

Generative AI leverages recent advances in foundation models. Unlike traditional Machine Learning (ML), where each new use case requires a new model to be designed and built using specific data, foundation models are trained on large amounts of unlabeled data, which can then be adapted to new scenarios and business applications. A foundation model makes massive AI scalability possible, while amortizing the initial work of model building each time it is used, as the data requirements for fine tuning additional models are much lower. This results in both increased ROI and much faster time to deployment.

IBM watsonx is built with this in mind, providing everyone from business users to data scientists with access to a single platform where they can build their own AI models–or fine-tune high quality AI models that include generative AI and machine learning capabilities, using their own data, and deploy them at scale in a trusted and open environment.

IBM watsonx is comprised of three solutions:

1) watsonx.ai -> The technology behind watsonx.ai - IBM’s AI and data platform for enterprise and our overarching promise is to provide safe, enterprise-ready automation products. It is part of our ongoing work at IBM to accelerate our customers’ journey to derive value from this new paradigm in AI. Watson.ai includes:

- Data: the foundation of your foundation model - Data quality matters. An AI model trained on biased or toxic data will naturally tend to produce biased or toxic outputs. At IBM we have focused on meticulously curating everything that goes into our models. We have developed AI tools to aggressively filter our data for hate and profanity, licensing restrictions, and bias. When objectionable data is identified, we remove it, retrain the model, and repeat.

- Efficient foundation models focused on enterprise value - IBM’s new watsonx.ai studio offers a suite of foundation models aimed at delivering enterprise value. They’ve been incorporated into a range of IBM products that will be made available to IBM customers in the coming months.

- Hybrid cloud tools for foundation models - the final piece of foundation model tools is an easy-to-use software platform for tuning and deploying models. IBM’s hybrid, cloud-native inference stack, built on RedHat OpenShift, has been optimized for training and serving foundation models. Enterprises can leverage OpenShift’s flexibility to run models from anywhere, including on-premises.

We’ve created a suite of tools in watsonx.ai that provide a user-friendly user interface and developer-friendly libraries for building foundation model-based solutions. In addition to IBM’s own models, watsonx.ai provides seamless access to a broad catalog of open-source models for enterprises to experiment with and quickly iterate on. In a new partnership with Hugging Face, IBM will offer thousands of open-source Hugging Face foundation models, datasets, and libraries in watsonx.ai.

2) watsonx.data -> Scale AI workloads, for all your data, anywhere. See what’s coming.

An open, hybrid and governed data store. Watsonx.data makes it possible for enterprises to scale analytics and AI with a fit-for-purpose data store, built on an open lakehouse architecture, supported by querying, governance and open data formats to access and share data. With watsonx.data, you can connect to data in minutes, quickly get trusted insights and reduce your data warehouse costs. General availability of watsonx.data is expected in July.

Join us live on July 27^th to learn more about watsonx.data and why organizations are choosing an open data lakehouse approach to scale AI workloads.

3) watsonx.governance -> The more AI is embedded into daily workflows, the more you need proactive governance to drive responsible, ethical decisions across the business. Watsonx.governance allows you to direct, manage, and monitor your organization’s AI activities, and employs software automation to strengthen your ability to mitigate risk, manage regulatory requirements and address ethical concerns without the excessive costs of switching your data science platform—even for models developed using third-party tools. General availability of watsonx.governance is expected in October. Join the waitlist.

A new era in AI has arrived! Read more about “How to thrive in this new era of AI with trust and confidence”. Let’s put AI to work—and make the world work better—together.

For any questions or requests contact your IBM Representative today.