IBM Watson is getting an AI makeover, and that's bad news for workers everywhere

IBM Watsonx is the computing giant's AI development platform in the making

IBM has announced (opens in new tab) its new Watsonx platform designed to supply the right tools to companies still struggling to get their versions of AI to market.

The all-encompassing platform promises to deliver ML tools and AI foundation models, as well as the right hardware and data storage, in a bid to help enterprises train their own tools including AI writers. IBM is also making available a governance toolkit as part of the offering.

At the company's annual Think conference, IBM CEO Arvind Krishna described the platform as enabling customers to develop from being “users” to becoming “AI advantaged,” citing scalability, affordability, and efficiency.

Train your own AI with IBM Watsonx

The company’s own foundation models and open-source models promise to speed up AI development for companies, though the thought is nothing new and is already one being used by some of its biggest competitors including Amazon.

The move also sees IBM broadening a partnership with Hugging Face, which will in turn allow the watsonx.ai studio to benefit from the latter’s open source libraries and its thousands of open models and datasets.

Cost is clearly the area that IBM is looking to tackle with the launch of Watsonx, promising a reduction in data warehouse costs by as much as 50%.

It is also hoped that the Watson Code Assistant will be rolled out “later this year” - much like GitHub Copilot X, it will use generative AI to help developers write and amend code with English-language prompts.

While AI investments continue to skyrocket, many, including IBM’s own workers, are concerned at the thought of the company’s commitment to the emerging technology, given as it was reported earlier this month that IBM would be pausing hiring in favor of AI, with as many as 7,800 jobs at risk.

IBM watsonx.ai and watsonx.data are expected to be generally available by July 2023.

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