Today, IBM (NYSE: IBM) announced the general availability of the first models in the watsonx Granite model series — a collection of generative AI models to advance the infusion of generative AI into business applications and workflows. IBM also confirmed that the standard contractual intellectual property protections for IBM products will apply to IBM-developed watsonx AI models. IBM's Granite models apply generative AI to the modalities of language and code.
Recognizing that a single model will not fit the unique needs of every business use case, the Granite models are being developed in different sizes. These IBM models — built on a decoder-only architecture — aim to help businesses scale AI. For instance, businesses can use them to apply retrieval augmented generation for searching enterprise knowledge bases to generate tailored responses to customer inquiries; use summarization to condense long-form content — like contracts or call transcripts — into short descriptions; and deploy insight extraction and classification to determine factors like customer sentiment.
With these models and watsonx, IBM enables businesses to be AI value creators. Businesses can bring their proprietary data to IBM base models and build a model that is unique to their business and use cases.
IBM has heavily invested for years in developing its foundation models. They are custom-built for the specific requirements of business use cases, which by definition are much more focused than consumer AI and demand the highest levels of precision and accuracy. IBM's internal benchmarking shows that specialized models can deliver better accuracy, and do so with lower infrastructure requirements, to achieve improved price-performance.