IBM releases new AI models for businesses

IBM has launched the latest version of its artificial intelligence models which will cater towards businesses looking to capitalize on the surge in enterprises adopting generative AI technology. The models codenamed “Granite 3.0" will be made open-source, similar to other versions in IBM's Granite family of AI models. This approach differs from rivals such as Microsoft that charge customers for access to their models.

In line with the company's commitment to open-source AI, the Granite models are released under the permissive Apache 2.0 license, making them unique in the combination of performance, flexibility and autonomy they provide to enterprise clients and the community at large.

·         IBM's Granite 3.0 family includes -

·         General Purpose/Language: Granite 3.0 8B Instruct, Granite 3.0 2B Instruct, Granite 3.0 8B Base, Granite 3.0 2B Base

·         Guardrails & Safety: Granite Guardian 3.0 8B, Granite Guardian 3.0 2B

·         Mixture-of-Experts: Granite 3.0 3B-A800M Instruct, Granite 3.0 1B-A400M Instruct, Granite 3.0 3B-A800M Base, Granite 3.0 1B-A400M Base

The new Granite 3.0 8B and 2B language models are designed as 'workhorse' models for enterprise AI, delivering strong performance for tasks such as Retrieval Augmented Geneneration (RAG), classification, summarization, entity extraction, and tool use. These compact, versatile models are designed to be fine-tuned with enterprise data and seamlessly integrated across diverse business environments or workflows.

While many large language models (LLMs) are trained on publicly available data, a vast majority of enterprise data remains untapped. By combining a small Granite model with enterprise data, especially using the revolutionary alignment technique InstructLab – introduced by IBM and RedHat in May – IBM believes businesses can achieve task-specific performance that rivals larger models at a fraction of the cost.