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Last week, around 4,000 IBM employees, customers, and partners attended IBM Think, the company’s annual conference, to hear the latest innovations, updates, and news from IBM. This year’s event came with many announcements, but with AI in focus, its announcement of watsonx drew significant attention—with the market zeroing in on the substantial opportunities around AI.

After attending the event, and hearing from IBM executives as well as following the broad swath of recent AI and generative AI announcements, I believe that IBM’s announcement of watsonx is a significant milestone in the advancement of enterprise AI. Built on top of the Red Hat OpenShift platform, watsonx offers a full tech stack for training, deploying, and supporting AI capabilities across any cloud environment This move by IBM is indicative of the growing importance of supporting generative AI, and the potential for businesses to benefit from the ease and reliability of this technology. As I see it, this announcement is one of the more important announcements tying together much of the exciting generative AI news and analysis with the more practical connective tissues that will drive meaningful adoption in the enterprise.

Watsonx features three different components: watsonx.ai, watsonx.data, and watsonx.governance. The first component, watsonx.ai, is a design studio for base models, machine learning, and generative AI. It can be used to train, tune, and deploy AI models including IBM supplied models, open-source models, and client provided models, and is currently in preview with select IBM clients and partners, and is expected to be available to the general public in July.

Update: The image for the ChatGPT 3.5 and vicuna-13B comparison has been updated for readability.

With the launch of Large Language Models (LLMs) for Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI), the world has become both enamored and concerned with the potential for AI. The ability to hold a conversation, pass a test, develop a research paper, or write software code are tremendous feats of AI, but they are only the beginning to what GenAI will be able to accomplish over the next few years. All this innovative capability comes at a high cost in terms of processing performance and power consumption. So, while the potential for AI may be limitless, physics and costs may ultimately be the boundaries.

Tirias Research forecasts that on the current course, generative AI data center server infrastructure plus operating costs will exceed $76 billion by 2028, with growth challenging the business models and profitability of emergent services such as search, content creation, and business automation incorporating GenAI. For perspective, this cost is more than twice the estimated annual operating cost of Amazon’s cloud service AWS, which today holds one third of the cloud infrastructure services market according to Tirias Research estimates. This forecast incorporates an aggressive 4X improvement in hardware compute performance, but this gain is overrun by a 50X increase in processing workloads, even with a rapid rate of innovation around inference algorithms and their efficiency. Neural Networks (NNs) designed to run at scale will be even more highly optimized and will continue to improve over time, which will increase each server’s capacity. However, this improvement is countered by increasing usage, more demanding use cases, and more sophisticated models with orders of magnitude more parameters. The cost and scale of GenAI will demand innovation in optimizing NNs and is likely to push the computational load out from data centers to client devices like PCs and smartphones.

Technology As A Force For Good In People’s Lives — Dr. Emre Ozcan, PhD, VP, Global Head of Digital Health & Walid Mehanna, Group Data Officer And Senior Vice President, Merck KGaA, Darmstadt, Germany.

EPISODE DISCLAIMER — At any time during this episode when anyone says Merck, in any context, it shall always be referring to Merck KGaA, Darmstadt, Germany.

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Join top executives in San Francisco on July 11–12, to hear how leaders are integrating and optimizing AI investments for success. Learn More

Ever since the launch of ChatGPT in late 2022, AI has grabbed the attention of people and businesses around the world. This technology was previously understood as highly promising but a topic for the future. Today, it has loudly announced itself, catching businesses off-guard as they mobilize to make sense of its exciting potential to automate processes and supercharge efficiencies.

One important aspect to examine is where investors are currently focusing their attention. This latest wave of AI has focused early attention on those startups and businesses already using AI in their products and services (loosely termed AI adopters). Other factors to consider are whether investors are pausing their investments and causing illiquidity in the market. In this, investors consider likely consequences and disruptions across industries and update their commercial and technical due diligence approaches as they look to side-step hazards and seize opportunities.

Unlike other businesses pushing clean nuclear energy, Helion is working on a “pulsed non-ignition fusion system.”

Microsoft Corporation has placed a big bet on Helion by agreeing to purchase power generated by its nuclear fusion process. Helion is also backed by Sam Altman, the OpenAI CEO with whom Microsoft is spearheading the artificial intelligence (AI) race.

Nuclear fusion is the holy grail of clean energy as it promises the generation of power without the emission of carbon or hassles of radioactive nuclear waste.

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The ability to build AI systems and the idea empower a business to scale them is on the rise. Read about how AI could empower any business at Landing AI.

Helion Energy has announced that Microsoft will become its first customer, in a deal that aims to supply 50 MW of fusion power by 2028.

Assembled electromagnetic coils that will be used in Helion’s 7th fusion prototype, Polaris. (Photo: Business Wire)

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Canada’s largest oilsands companies under the umbrella of the Pathways Alliance are accused of greenwashing and making false environmental claims. via @torontostar

Greenpeace Canada alleges the consortium’s ad campaign, “Let’s clear the air,” is greenwashing — when a company makes false or misleading claims about the environmental attributes of their business.

“Our request to the Competition Bureau regarding the Pathways Alliance’s misleading ad campaign was accepted and has set off an official inquiry into the dubious advertising practices of the Pathways Alliance,” Greenpeace Canada’s senior researcher and writer, Nola Poirier, said in a statement. “We think the public deserves to be told the truth about the environmental harm caused by fossil fuel production, not fed misleading sound bites by industry.”

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AIOps platform Avantra has launched a new cloud edition for RISE with SAP. A SAP product, RISE with SAP helps companies to get started with cloud SAP solutions. Avantra’s new offering with help RISE customers to automate cloud, on-premise, and third-party operation activities for migrating their business operations to the cloud.

The Avantra cloud edition for RISE with SAP will offer a single point of access to services like configuration management for regulated industries, one-off services, and cloud application services, along with offering operating data. In addition, the new edition will support over 100 services for customers to manage data files, determine security requirements, and perform end-to-end application monitoring.

“At a time when more and more companies are looking at enterprise-wide digital transformation and wanting to connect rather than isolate operations, impeding the ability to optimise hybrid operations presents a significant barrier to business advancement. We developed a Cloud edition designed to work with RISE with SAP to remove this barrier, recognising that this need is not likely to go away any time soon,” said John Appleby, chief executive officer, Avantra.