International Business Machines announced Tuesday that it will release a family of artificial intelligence models as open Source software and help Saudi Arabia train an artificial intelligence system in Arabic.
The Armonk, N.Y.-based company has taken a different approach than some of its rivals, such as Microsoft and others, who guard their artificial intelligence models and charge for them. ‘access. Like Facebook owner Meta Platforms, IBM offers open access to the models themselves and on Wednesday opened its “Granite” family of AI models to companies so they can customize them.
Granite tools are designed to help software developers complete computer code faster. To make the models profitable, IBM offers a paid tool, Watsonx, which allows the models to run smoothly in a data center after customizing them.
IBM’s strategy has been to try to make money when customers actually use the AI models, whether they come from IBM or other companies and run in IBM’s data centers. IBM or not.
“We think we’re still in the early days of generative AI models,” Arvind Krishna, IBM’s chief executive, told Reuters. “Ultimately, competition is good for buyers. We also want to be safe and responsible.”
IBM also said that the Saudi Data and Artificial Intelligence Authority will train its “ALLaM” Arabic language model using Watsonx, adding new language skills to IBM’s offerings, including the ability to understand several dialects of Arabic.
