IBM watsonx is an as-a-service AI platform for businesses

IBM watsonx was unveiled today, the company’s new data and AI platform built for businesses looking to adopt and scale AI models.

Watsonx will be split into three products focused on AI, data, and governance respectively, and available through a simple user interface.

The platform will allow enterprises to quickly train and deploy AI models, and will come with a pre-packaged library of foundation models and enterprise data.

At launch, these will include fm.code, a beta model for code generation and IT automation; fm.NLP, a set of large language models (LLMs) for customized domains; and a model for the interpretation of climate and land data called fm.geospatial.

IBM has also partnered with the community platform Hugging Face to provide users with access to open source models and datasets. 

“With the development of foundation models, AI for business is more powerful than ever,” said Arvind Krishna, IBM chairman and CEO. 

“Foundation models make deploying AI significantly more scalable, affordable, and efficient. We built IBM watsonx for the needs of enterprises, so that clients can be more than just users, they can become AI advantaged. 

“With IBM watsonx, clients can quickly train and deploy custom AI capabilities across their entire business, all while retaining full control of their data.”

Watsonx.data and watsonx.governance were announced as products that enhance the AI experience across the platform.

Through watsonx.data, IBM aims to provide enterprises with an open lakehouse architecture prepared for AI workloads.

It claimed that through workload optimization, watsondata.x can reduce data warehouse costs by up to 50% and allow for streamlined data queries.

Like many large language models, use cases for watsonx.ai include generating, classifying, extracting, and summarizing text.

Watsonx.governance provides a toolkit for AI oversight, from detecting model bias, to providing documentation that helps AI models retain transparency and explainability.

The firm has placed great emphasis on its open ecosystem approach to AI, in a similar and competitive approach to AWS Bedrock.

IBM Watson was an early outlier for natural language processing, having come to fame in 2011 with its notable appearance on the game show Jeopardy.

Watson Health, the division focused on the clinical applications of artificial intelligence and data analytics, was sold off in 2022 to private equity firm Francisco Partners.

This return could indicate the return of IBM in the AI market, with a focus on providing enterprise-ready and business-specific generative AI as opposed to the wider approaches of Google and OpenAI.

To complement its increased AI activities, IBM’s consulting division has also announced the creation of a Center of Excellence for generative AI.

This will draw together more than 1,000 experts in the field, who will work to build wastonx solutions for enterprise clients.

IBM aims for watsonx to become generally available in July 2023.