IBM Corp. today said it will host Meta Platforms Inc.’s Llama 2, a 70-billion-parameter large language model, in the watsonx.ai studio enterprise artificial intelligence development platform it announced in May. Early access is now available to select clients.

Watsonx.ai, can be used to train generative AI models and other types of neural networks without having to build their own models from scratch. The platform includes a catalog of prepackaged AI models along with datasets for training them.

Meta stunned the AI world in February when it released Llama to open source. Foundation models such as Llama are typically trained on large sets of unlabeled data, which allows them to be fine-tuned for various tasks. Meta released Llama 2, formally known as Large Language Model Meta AI 2-chat, to open source last month, saying it would allow businesses to customize their own AI models with proprietary data and tools.

Ongoing collaboration

IBM and Meta have collaborated on several open-source projects in the past, including the PyTorch machine learning framework and the Presto query engine used in watsonx.data, which is a purpose-fit data store built on an open lakehouse architecture.

IBM said its strategy is to offer both third-party and its own AI models. It currently offers both its models and those hosted in the community sponsored by Hugging Face Inc. that are pretrained to support a range of natural language processing tasks such as question answering, content generation and summarization, text classification and extraction. The company said it plans to soon release an AI tuning studio, fact sheets for watsonx.ai models and its own generative AI models.

In line with enterprises’ concerns about security and data privacy, IBM said users running the Llama-2 model through the prompt lab in watsonx.ai can toggle a guardrails function to automatically remove harmful language from input and output text. Meta also provides documentation for building responsible AI models.

IBM is making an aggressive bid to be the technology provider of choice for enterprise AI development. A recent study by Upwork Global Inc. found that 73% of chief executives say their companies are embracing generative AI. IBM said its 21,000 data, AI and automation consultants have conducted more than 40,000 enterprise client engagements and the Center of Excellence for Generative AI as part of its consulting division employs more than 1,000 consultants.

Image: IBM