Introducing the technology behind watsonx.ai, IBM’s AI and data platform for enterprise

We stand on the frontier of an AI revolution. Over the previous decade, deep studying arose from a seismic collision of knowledge availability and sheer compute energy, enabling a number of spectacular AI capabilities. However we’ve confronted a paradoxical problem: automation is labor intensive. It seems like a joke, but it surely’s not, as anybody who has tried to resolve enterprise issues with AI could know.  

Conventional AI instruments, whereas highly effective, might be costly, time-consuming, and troublesome to make use of. Information have to be laboriously collected, curated, and labeled with task-specific annotations to coach AI fashions. Constructing a mannequin requires specialised, hard-to-find expertise — and every new process requires repeating the method. Because of this, companies have targeted primarily on automating duties with ample information and excessive enterprise worth, leaving every part else on the desk. However that is beginning to change. 

The emergence of transformers and self-supervised studying strategies has allowed us to faucet into huge portions of unlabeled information, paving the way in which for giant pre-trained fashions, generally known as “foundation models.” These giant fashions have lowered the fee and labor concerned in automation.  

Basis fashions present a strong and versatile basis for quite a lot of AI functions. We are able to use basis fashions to shortly carry out duties with restricted annotated information and minimal effort; in some instances, we’d like solely to explain the duty at hand to coax the mannequin into fixing it.  

However these highly effective applied sciences additionally introduce new dangers and challenges for enterprises. A lot of at present’s fashions are educated on datasets of unknown high quality and provenance, resulting in offensive, biased, or factually incorrect responses. The biggest fashions are costly, energy-intensive to coach and run, and sophisticated to deploy. 

We at IBM have been creating an method that addresses core challenges for utilizing basis fashions for enterprise. Right now, we announced watsonx.ai, IBM’s gateway to the most recent AI instruments and applied sciences in the marketplace at present. In a testomony to how briskly the sector is transferring, some instruments are simply weeks outdated, and we’re including new ones as I write.  

What’s included in watsonx.ai — a part of IBM’s bigger watsonx choices introduced this week — is different, and can proceed to evolve, however our overarching promise is similar: to supply protected, enterprise-ready automation merchandise. 

It’s a part of our ongoing work at IBM to speed up our prospects’ journey to derive worth from this new paradigm in AI. Right here, I’ll describe our work to construct a collection of enterprise-grade, IBM-trained basis fashions, together with our method to information and mannequin architectures. I’ll additionally define our new platform and tooling that permits enterprises to construct and deploy basis model-based options utilizing a large catalog of open-source fashions, along with our personal. 

Information: the inspiration of your basis mannequin  

Data quality issues. An AI mannequin educated on biased or poisonous information will naturally have a tendency to provide biased or poisonous outputs. This drawback is compounded within the period of basis fashions, the place the information used to coach fashions sometimes comes from many sources and is so ample that no human being may moderately comb by all of it. 

Since information is the gasoline that drives basis fashions, we at IBM have targeted on meticulously curating every part that goes into our fashions. We have now developed AI instruments to aggressively filter our information for hate and profanity, licensing restrictions, and bias. When objectionable information is recognized, we take away it, retrain the mannequin, and repeat. 

Information curation is a process that’s by no means actually completed. We proceed to develop and refine new strategies to enhance information high quality and controls, to satisfy an evolving set of authorized and regulatory necessities. We have now constructed an end-to-end framework to trace the uncooked information that’s been cleaned, the strategies that had been used, and the fashions that every datapoint has touched.  

We proceed to assemble high-quality information to assist sort out among the most urgent enterprise challenges throughout a spread of domains like finance, regulation, cybersecurity, and sustainability.  We’re presently concentrating on greater than 1 terabyte of curated textual content for coaching our basis fashions, whereas including curated software program code, satellite tv for pc information, and IT community occasion information and logs.  

IBM Analysis can also be creating strategies to infuse belief all through the inspiration mannequin lifecycle, to mitigate bias and enhance mannequin security. Our work on this space contains FairIJ, which identifies biased information factors in information used to tune a mannequin, in order that they are often edited out. Different strategies, like fairness reprogramming, enable us to mitigate biases in a mannequin even after it has been educated. 

Environment friendly basis fashions targeted on enterprise worth 

IBM’s new watsonx.ai studio affords a suite of foundation models aimed toward delivering enterprise worth. They’ve been integrated into a spread of IBM merchandise that will probably be made accessible to IBM prospects within the coming months. 

Recognizing that one measurement doesn’t match all, we’re constructing a household of language and code basis fashions of various sizes and architectures. Every mannequin household has a geology-themed code title —Granite, Sandstone, Obsidian, and Slate — which brings collectively cutting-edge improvements from IBM Analysis and the open analysis neighborhood. Every mannequin might be custom-made for a spread of enterprise duties. 

Our Granite fashions are based mostly on a decoder-only, GPT-like structure for generative duties. Sandstone fashions use an encoder-decoder structure and are nicely suited to fine-tuning on particular duties, interchangeable with Google’s in style T5 fashions. Obsidian fashions make the most of a brand new modular structure developed by IBM Analysis, offering excessive inference effectivity and ranges of efficiency throughout quite a lot of duties. Slate refers to a household of encoder-only (RoBERTa-based) fashions, which whereas not generative, are quick and efficient for a lot of enterprise NLP duties. All watsonx.ai fashions are educated on IBM’s curated, enterprise-focused information lake, on our custom-designed cloud-native AI supercomputer, Vela. 

Effectivity and sustainability are core design rules for watsonx.ai. At IBM Analysis, we’ve invented new applied sciences for environment friendly mannequin coaching, together with our “LiGO” algorithm that recycles small fashions and “grows” them into bigger ones. This technique can save from 40% to 70% of the time, value, and carbon output required to coach a mannequin. To enhance inference speeds, we’re leveraging our deep experience in quantization, or shrinking fashions from 32-point floating level arithmetic to a lot smaller integer bit codecs. Lowering AI mannequin precision brings large effectivity advantages with out sacrificing accuracy. We hope to quickly run these compressed fashions on our AI-optimized chip, the IBM AIU. 

Hybrid cloud instruments for basis fashions 

The ultimate piece of the inspiration mannequin puzzle is creating an easy-to-use software program platform for tuning and deploying fashions. IBM’s hybrid, cloud-native inference stack, constructed on RedHat OpenShift, has been optimized for coaching and serving basis fashions. Enterprises can leverage OpenShift’s flexibility to run fashions from anyplace, together with on-premises. 

We’ve created a collection of instruments in watsonx.ai that present prospects with a user-friendly consumer interface and developer-friendly libraries for constructing basis model-based options. Our Immediate Lab allows customers to quickly carry out AI duties with only a few labeled examples. The Tuning Studio allows fast and sturdy mannequin customization utilizing your individual information, based mostly on state-of-the-art environment friendly fine-tuning strategies developed by IBM Research. 

Along with IBM’s personal fashions, watsonx.ai offers seamless entry to a broad catalog of open-source fashions for enterprises to experiment with and shortly iterate on. In a brand new partnership with Hugging Face, IBM will supply 1000’s of open-source Hugging Face basis fashions, datasets, and libraries in watsonx.ai. Hugging Face, in flip, will supply all of IBM’s proprietary and open-access fashions and instruments on watsonx.ai.  

To check out a brand new mannequin merely choose it from a drop-down menu. You possibly can learn more about the studio here.

Seeking to the long run 

Basis fashions are altering the panorama of AI, and progress lately has solely been accelerating. We at IBM are excited to assist chart the frontiers of this quickly evolving area and translate innovation into actual enterprise worth. 

Learn more about watsonx.ai