IBM to launch Meta’s Llama 2 on WatsonX, an enterprise AI platform for businesses

In early July, International Business Machines (IBM) released a beta version of its new enterprise AI platform designed for businesses. Right after rolling out the beta release, IBM also revealed that disclosed that 150 enterprise clients, among them Citibank, NASA, Samsung, and Wimbledon, took part in testing the company’s beta and getting a preview of the technology.  Now about a month later, IBM is opening up Watsonx to Meta.

IBM announced on Wednesday it would host Meta’s latest open-source AI language model, Llama 2 on Watsonx, and also provides early access to Meta’s Llama 2 to some clients. The news comes just three weeks after Meta released a free version of Llama 2 large language model for generative AI for commercial use.

IBM also added that after the launch of Meta’s open-source AI model, it plans to introduce more software like AI tuning studios, fact sheets, and other generative AI models, Reuters reported.

Llama 2, which is a commercial iteration of Meta’s open-source AI language model released in July, is being distributed through Microsoft’s Azure cloud services. The move is aimed at entering the emerging generative AI market, competing with OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Bard.

Meta released the first version of its AI language model called LLaMA in February to help researchers, government, civil society and academic organizations, and industry research. LLaMA is designed to generate text and conversations, summarize written material, and perform complicated tasks like solving math theorems or predicting protein structures. In a Facebook post, Meta said:

“We introduce LLaMA, a collection of foundation language models ranging from 7B to 65B parameters. We train our models on trillions of tokens, and show that it is possible to train state-of-the-art models using publicly available datasets exclusively, without resorting to proprietary and inaccessible datasets. In particular, LLaMA-13B outperforms GPT-3 (175B) on most benchmarks, and LLaMA-65B is competitive with the best models, Chinchilla70B and PaLM-540B. We release all our models to the research community.”

According to the report, Meta revealed that Llama 2 will be distributed by Microsoft via its Azure cloud service and will be compatible with the Windows operating system, Meta said in a blog post, referring to Microsoft as “our preferred partner” for the release.