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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.
(Reporting By Jane Lanhee Lee; Editing by Cynthia Osterman)
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