International Business Machines Corp on Tuesday launched
watsonx, a new artificial intelligence and data platform to help companies
integrate AI in their business.
The new AI platform launch comes over a decade after IBM’s
software called Watson got attention for winning the game show Jeopardy. IBM at
the time said Watson could “learn” and process human language. But Watson’s
high cost at the time made it a challenge for companies to use, according to
Reuters reporting.
Fast forward a decade, chatbot ChatGPT’s overnight success
is making AI adoption at companies a focus, and IBM is looking to grab new
business. This time, the lower cost of implementing the large language AI
models means the chances of success are high, IBM CEO Arvind Krishna told
Reuters ahead of the company’s annual Think conference.
“When something becomes 100 times cheaper, it really sets up
an attraction that’s very, very different,” said Krishna. “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.”
Krishna said AI could reduce certain back office jobs at IBM
in the coming years. “That doesn’t mean the total employment decreases,” he
said about some media reports talking about IBM pausing hiring for thousands of
jobs that AI could replace.
“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 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 modeling.
Source : Reuters
- Agencies
