Watsonx To Take AI to the Next Level
- By Lachlan Colquhoun
- May 24, 2023
While much of the hype about generative AI has focused on the ChatGPT product created by OpenAI, industry giant IBM has been quietly working on launching its next-generation product Watsonx.
ChatGPT has been a global revelation, but in many ways, it has raised more questions than it has been able to answer. Businesses still face significant hurdles in the training and maintenance of the different AI models.
While AI may have made significant progress over the last decades, it has remained challenging to scale and operationalize, with each new use case requiring a new model to be designed and built using specific data.
Businesses are still underprepared, unsure how to profit from AI and struggle to make decisions with the exploding volumes of data.
They are also concerned about ethically and securely integrating emerging technology like generative AI and foundation models into their business.
An upcoming survey of business leaders from IBM will show 30% of business leaders cite trust and transparency issues, and 42% cite data privacy concerns as barriers holding them back from adopting generative AI.
New AI platform
In May 2023, IBM introduced the Watsonx Platform to the market, with the goal that it will generally be available in July this year for AI builders to train, test tune and deploy both machine and new generative AI capabilities.
The goal is to deliver a complete technology stack that enables organizations to train, tune and deploy AI across their organization — with their trusted data, speed, and governance — in one place and across any cloud environment.
“We built IBM Watsonx for the needs of enterprises so that clients can be more than just users; they can become AI advantaged”
According to Arvind Krishna, IBM chairman and CEO, foundation models are at the core of the new platform and will make deploying “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,” said Krishna.
“With IBM Watsonx, clients can quickly train and deploy custom AI capabilities across their entire business, all while retaining full control of their data.”
In the studio
Watsonx comprises three specific offerings. The first is the Watsonx.ai studio, where users can find a range of foundation models to work with and use “cost-effective infrastructure that facilitates the entire data and AI cycle” from development to deployment and monitoring.
There is a model library where users can access IBM curated and trained foundation models, which use a curated set of enterprise data where the lineage has been audited.
“These models are being trained not on language, but on a variety of modalities including code, time-series data, tabular data, geospatial data and IT events data,” IBM says.
As part of a new collaboration between IBM and Hugging Face, the watsonx.ai studio will build upon Hugging Face's open-source libraries and offer thousands of Hugging Face open models and datasets.
Watsonx.data is the second offering, a data store built on open lakehouse architecture optimized for governed data and AI workloads. The solution can manage workloads on-premises, and across multi-cloud environments, and through workload optimization, organizations can reduce data warehouse costs by up to 50%.
“Watsonx.data will allow users to access their increasingly robust data through a single point of entry while applying multiple fit-for-purpose query engines to uncover valuable insights,” said IBM.
Governance and trust
The third offering in the Watsonx launch is around governance, with an AI governance toolkit to enable trusted workflows.
The governance toolkit aims to help mitigate the risk, time and cost associated with manual processes and provides the documentation necessary to drive transparent and explainable outcomes. IBM will also provide “the mechanisms to protect customer privacy, proactively detect model bias and drift, and help organizations meet their ethics standards.”
The stakes are high in the AI market, which IBM forecasts will unlock around USD16 trillion in value by 2030.
Looking around the Asia Pacific, key markets are moving at speed. According to IDC's Worldwide Artificial Intelligence Spending Guide, Australia's spending on AI systems will grow to USD3.6 billion in 2025, representing a compounded annual growth rate of 24.4% for 2020-2025. In Singapore, IMDA estimates that the AI market has the potential to become a USD960 million market in 2022 and USD16 billion by 2030, with a CAGR of 42.2%.
During the AI Summit 2022, it was also announced that Vietnam now ranks 26th in the world in AI research capacity. In Southeast Asia, Vietnam and Singapore are the two countries in the ranking. These economies are keen to harness the power of AI, with IBM eager to steal a march on competitors and give them the tools to do so.
Lachlan Colquhoun is the Australia and New Zealand correspondent for CDOTrends and the NextGenConnectivity editor. He remains fascinated with how businesses reinvent themselves through digital technology to solve existing issues and change their entire business models. You can reach him at [email protected].
Image credit: iStockphoto/hirun