International Business Machines Corp. on Tuesday unveiled watsonx, a new data and artificial intelligence platform designed to assist businesses in implementing AI.

 

The new AI platform was introduced more than ten years after IBM's Watson supercomputer gained notoriety for winning the Jeopardy game show. Watson could "learn" and process human language, according to IBM at the time. However, some claim that Watson's exorbitant price at the time made it difficult for businesses to use.

 

In ten years, AI adoption at businesses has been a focus due to the instant success of the chatbot ChatGPT, and IBM is vying for new business. This time, there is a better possibility of success because to the decreased cost of installing the massive language AI models, 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 continued by saying that IBM was adopting a more open ecosystem and working with organisations like Hugging Face, which develops open-source AI software.