IBM Introduces Granite 3.0: High Performing AI Models Built for Business

ARMONK, N.Y., Oct. 21, 2024 /PRNewswire/ -- Today, at IBM's (NYSE: IBM) annual TechXchange event the company announced the release of its most advanced family of AI models to date, Granite 3.0. IBM's third-generation Granite flagship language models can outperform or match similarly sized models from leading model providers on many academic and industry benchmarks, showcasing strong performance, transparency and safety.

Consistent with the company's commitment to open-source AI, the Granite models are released under the permissive Apache 2.0 license, making them unique in the combination of performance, flexibility and autonomy they provide to enterprise clients and the community at large.

IBM's Granite 3.0 family includes:

The new Granite 3.0 8B and 2B language models are designed as 'workhorse' models for enterprise AI, delivering strong performance for tasks such as Retrieval Augmented Geneneration (RAG), classification, summarization, entity extraction, and tool use. These compact, versatile models are designed to be fine-tuned with enterprise data and seamlessly integrated across diverse business environments or workflows.

While many large language models (LLMs) are trained on publicly available data, a vast majority of enterprise data remains untapped. By combining a small Granite model with enterprise data, especially using the revolutionary alignment technique InstructLab – introduced by IBM and RedHat in May – IBM believes businesses can achieve task-specific performance that rivals larger models at a fraction of the cost (based on an observed range of 3x-23x less cost than large frontier models in several early proofs-of-concept¹).

The Granite 3.0 release reaffirms IBM's commitment to building transparency, safety, and trust in AI products. The Granite 3.0 technical report and responsible use guide provide a description of the datasets used to train these models, details of the filtering, cleansing, and curation steps applied, along with comprehensive results of model performance across major academic and enterprise benchmarks.

Critically, IBM provides an IP indemnity for all Granite models on watsonx.ai so enterprise clients can be more confident in merging their data with the models.

Raising the bar: Granite 3.0 benchmarks

The Granite 3.0 language models also demonstrate promising results on raw performance.

On standard academic benchmarks defined by Hugging Face's OpenLLM Leaderboard, the Granite 3.0 8B Instruct model's overall performance leads on average against state-of-the-art-performance of similar-sized open source models from Meta and Mistral. On IBM's state-of-the-art AttaQ safety benchmark, the Granite 3.0 8B Instruct model leads across all measured safety dimensions compared to models from Meta and Mistral.² 

Across the core enterprise tasks of RAG, tool use, and tasks in the Cybersecurity domain, the Granite 3.0 8B Instruct model shows leading performance on average compared to similar-sized open source models from Mistral and Meta.³

The Granite 3.0 models were trained on over 12 trillion tokens on data taken from 12 different natural languages and 116 different programming languages, using a novel two-stage training method, leveraging results from several thousand experiments designed to optimize data quality, data selection, and training parameters. By the end of the year, the 3.0 8B and 2B language models are expected to include support for an extended 128K context window and multi-modal document understanding capabilities.

Demonstrating an excellent balance of performance and inference cost, IBM offers its Granite Mixture of Experts (MoE) Architecture models, Granite 3.0 1B-A400M and Granite 3.0 3B-A800M, as smaller, lightweight models that could be deployed for low latency applications as well as CPU-based deployments.  

IBM is also announcing an updated release of its pre-trained Granite Time Series models, the first versions of which were released earlier this year. These new models are trained on 3 times more data and deliver strong performance on all three major time series benchmarks, outperforming 10 times larger models from Google, Alibaba, and others. The updated models also provide greater modeling flexibility with support for external variables and rolling forecasts.⁴

Introducing Granite Guardian 3.0: ushering the next era of responsible AI   

As part of this release, IBM is also introducing a new family of Granite Guardian models that permit application developers to implement safety guardrails by checking user prompts and LLM responses for a variety of risks. The Granite Guardian 3.0 8B and 2B models provide the most comprehensive set of risk and harm detection capabilities available in the market today.

In addition to harm dimensions such as social bias, hate, toxicity, profanity, violence, jailbreaking and more, these models also provide a range of unique RAG-specific checks such as groundedness, context relevance, and answer relevance.  In extensive testing across 19 safety and RAG benchmarks, the Granite Guardian 3.0 8B model has higher overall accuracy on harm detection on average than all three generations of Llama Guard models from Meta. It also showed on par overall performance in hallucination detection on average with specialized hallucination detection models WeCheck and MiniCheck.⁵

While the Granite Guardian models are derived from the corresponding Granite language models, they can be used to implement guardrails alongside any open or proprietary AI models.

Availability of Granite 3.0 models

The entire suite of Granite 3.0 models and the updated time series models are available for download on HuggingFace under the permissive Apache 2.0 license. The instruct variants of the new Granite 3.0 8B and 2B language models and the Granite Guardian 3.0 8B and 2Bmodels are available today for commercial use on IBM's watsonx platform. A selection of the Granite 3.0 models will also be available as NVIDIA NIM microservices and through Google Cloud's Vertex AI Model Garden integrations with HuggingFace.

To help provide developer choice and ease of use and support local, edge deployments, a curated set of the Granite 3.0 models are also available on Ollama and Replicate.

The latest generation of Granite models expand IBM's robust open-source catalog of powerful LLMs. IBM has collaborated with ecosystem partners like AWS, Docker, Domo, Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. via its Qualcomm® AI Hub, Salesforce, SAP, and others to integrate a variety of Granite models into these partners' offerings or make Granite models available on their platforms, offering greater choice to enterprises across the world. 

Assistants to Agents: realizing the future for enterprise AI 

IBM is advancing enterprise AI through a spectrum of technologies – from models and assistants, to the tools needed to tune and deploy AI specifically for companies' unique data and use-cases. IBM is also paving the way for future AI agents that can self-direct, reflect, and perform complex tasks in dynamic business environments.

IBM continues to evolve its portfolio of AI assistant technologies – from watsonx Orchestrate to help companies build their own assistants via low-code tooling and automation, to a wide set of pre-built assistants for specific tasks and domains such as customer service, human resources, sales, and marketing. Organizations around the world have used watsonx Assistant to help them build AI assistants for tasks like answering routine questions from customers or employees, modernizing their mainframes and legacy IT applications, helping students explore potential career paths, or providing digital mortgage support for home buyers. 

Today IBM also unveiled the upcoming release of the next generation of watsonx Code Assistant, powered by Granite code models, to offer general-purpose coding assistance across languages like C, C++, Go, Java, and Python, with advanced application modernization capabilities for Enterprise Java Applications.⁶ Granite's code capabilities are also now accessible through a Visual Studio Code extension, IBM Granite.Code.

IBM also plans to release new tools to help developers build, customize and deploy AI more efficiently via watsonx.ai – including agentic frameworks, integrations with existing environments and low-code automations for common use-cases like RAG and agents.⁷

IBM is focused on developing AI agent technologies which are capable of greater autonomy, sophisticated reasoning and multi-step problem solving. The initial release of the Granite 3.0 8B model features support for key agentic capabilities, such as advanced reasoning and a highly-structured chat template and prompting style for implementing tool use workflows.  IBM also plans to introduce a new AI agent chat feature to IBM watsonx Orchestrate, which uses agentic capabilities to orchestrate AI Assistants, skills, and automations that help users increase productivity across their teams.⁸  IBM plans to continue building agent capabilities across its portfolio in 2025, including pre-built agents for specific domains and use-cases.

Expanded AI-powered delivery platform to supercharge IBM consultants with AI 

IBM is also announcing a major expansion of its AI-powered delivery platform, IBM Consulting Advantage. The multi-model platform contains AI agents, applications, and methods like repeatable frameworks that can empower 160,000 IBM consultants to deliver better and faster client value at a lower cost.

As part of the expansion, Granite 3.0 language models will become the default model in Consulting Advantage. Leveraging Granite's performance and efficiency, IBM Consulting will be able to help maximize the return-on-investment for the generative AI projects of IBM clients. 

Another key part of the expansion is the introduction of IBM Consulting Advantage for Cloud Transformation and Management and IBM Consulting Advantage for Business Operations. Each includes domain-specific AI agents, applications, and methods infused with IBM's best practices so IBM consultants can help accelerate client cloud and AI transformations in tasks, like code modernization and quality engineering, or transform and execute operations across domains, like finance, HR and procurement.

To learn more about Granite and IBM's AI for Business strategy, visit https://www.ibm.com/granite.

¹ Cost calculations are based on API cost per million tokens pricing of IBM watsonx for open models and openAI for GPT4 models (assuming blend of 80% inout, 20% output) for customer proofs-of-concept.
² IBM Research technical paper: Granite 3.0 Language Models
³ IBM Research technical paper: Granite 3.0 Language Models
⁴ The Tiny Time Mixer: Fast Pre-Trained Models for Enhanced Zero/Few Shot Forecasting on Multivariate Time Series
⁵ Evaluation results published in Granite Guardian GitHub Repo
⁶ Planned availability for Q4 2024
⁷ Planned availability for Q4 2024
⁸ Planned availability for Q1 2025

Media Contact:
Amy Angelini
alangeli@us.ibm.com

** The press release content is from PR Newswire. Bastille Post is not involved in its creation. **

IBM Introduces Granite 3.0: High Performing AI Models Built for Business

BANGKOK, Oct. 21, 2024 /PRNewswire/ -- Delta Electronics (Thailand) PCL. successfully hosted the Delta Future Industry Summit 2024 on October 18 at the Grand Ballroom, Chatrium Grand Hotel, Bangkok. Under the theme, "Unlocking the Potential of AI for Industrial and Data Center Growth in Southeast Asia," the summit explored AI's role in reshaping industries, enhancing efficiency, and driving sustainable development across the region. The event focused on AI's transformative potential in industrial automation, data center optimization, and building automation, emphasizing its ability to address energy efficiency, tackle sustainability challenges, and foster innovation in Southeast Asia's rapidly growing markets.

The Delta Future Industry Summit 2024 serves as a pivotal platform for exploring the challenges and opportunities presented by the latest industry trends, inspiring new ideas for sustainable growth. This year, by once again bringing together industry leaders, innovators, and policymakers, the summit fostered dynamic discussions on the future of AI-driven growth in the region. It emphasized the potential of Southeast Asian countries potentials and highlighted their efforts to overcome challenges, harnessing AI's power for sustainable development.

H.E. Mr. Prasert Jantararuangtong, Deputy Prime Minister of Thailand and Minister of Digital Economy and Society gave a special address to outline the nation's journey towards AI era titled, "Thailand's Path Forward in the AI Era". Mr. Victor Cheng, Delta Thailand CEO, gave a welcome speech and talk titled, "Harnessing AI for Unleashing Growth Potential in Southeast Asia". For the keynote address, Mrs. Paradee Sinthawanarong, Head of Marketing for Thailand & Vietnam at Facebook Thailand, gave a presentation titled, "The Future of AI-Driven Connectivity" and fireside chat session by Mr. Tim Rosenfield, co-founder and co-CEO of Firmus Technologies and Sustainable Metal Cloud (SMC) and Mr. David Leal, VP of SEA Business at Delta Electronics (Interviewer) in "Unlocking Sustainable AI Growth."

H.E. Mr. Prasert Jantararuangtong, Deputy Prime Minister of Thailand and Minister of Digital Economy and Society, remarked: "AI is not just a passing trend; it is a transformative force set to reshape our economies, industries, and societies. With the global AI market expected to reach beyond US$826 billion by 2030, Thailand is committed to seizing this opportunity through a structured approach outlined in Thailand's National AI Strategy. Our goal is to cultivate more than 30,000 AI talents by 2027 and generate AI-driven businesses valued at over 48 billion Baht. Likewise, our regional neighbors are investing in AI to drive economic growth and enhance quality of life. I believe that together, we can position the region as a global leading force in AI-driven innovation."

Mr. Victor Cheng, Delta Thailand CEO, emphasized "I am delighted to see the lively discussions at the Delta Future Industry Summit 2024 as we explore how AI is revolutionizing key industrial sectors. Delta is proud to be part of this transformation with AI-driven solutions, such as our highly efficient air-assisted liquid cooling (AALC) solution, which delivers 2.5 times more cooling capacity and consumes less than 7% of the power compared to traditional air cooling. Delta's vision goes beyond staying ahead of trends—it's about shaping a future where technology enriches lives, businesses thrive, and sustainability guides every action to create an intelligent, sustainable, and connected world."

For the keynote address, Mrs. Paradee Sinthawanarong, Head of Marketing, Thailand & Vietnam at Facebook Thailand, said "At Meta, we're proud to be connecting over half of the world's population in inspiring and innovative ways, with daily users exceeding 3.27 billion. To further drive growth for businesses, we've invested over $100 billion in innovation and AI technologies that supercharge these connections. Our cutting-edge Gen AI for businesses is now available to Thai businesses through our Advantage+ Creative empowers businesses to customize their campaigns into multiple variations, maximizing time and resources while efficiently building personalization and connection at scale."

Speaking at the keynote address, Mr. Tim Rosenfield, co-founder and co-CEO of Firmus Technologies and Sustainable Metal Cloud (SMC), emphasized that as AI continues to revolutionize industries, one of the biggest challenges we face is its growing energy demand. Southeast Asia, with its rapidly expanding data center market, offers a unique opportunity to address this. Liquid cooling infrastructure is a game-changer here, offering up to 50% reductions in power consumption and COâ‚‚ emissions. Retrofitting existing data centers with this technology is not only feasible but essential to ensure scalability while reducing environmental impact.

The first panel discussion, titled "Challenges and Opportunities in Implementing AI Datacenter Infrastructure" brought together thought leaders including Mr. Theerapun Charoensak, Managing Director of True IDC; Ms. Jamie Ko, Director of Regional Public Affairs and Policy at Grab; Ms. Ing Sirikulbordee, Public Policy of Meta; and Mr. Sakda Sae-Ueng, SEA Regional Business Director of ICT. The panelists delved into the importance of Responsible AI as a foundational element for developers, platforms, and countries, highlighting its crucial role in building trust, transparency, and accountability in AI technologies. They discussed strategies for integrating AI into existing platforms, emphasizing the need for seamless implementation that enhances user experiences while minimizing disruptions and operational risks. The conversation also explored how companies can future-proof their AI investments by staying agile and innovative, continuously adapting to rapid technological changes, and investing in scalable solutions to maintain a competitive edge in the ever-evolving digital landscape.

The second panel discussion, titled "Harnessing the Power of AI for Intelligent Work and Living Spaces" featured Mr. Aylwin Tan, Chief Customer Solutions Officer of CapitaLand; Mr. Pakasit Phungrassamee, Cement Operation Transformation Director at SCG; Dr. Chowarit Mitsantisuk from Kasetsart University; and Mr. Jen Yang, Global Strategic Product Development of Delta Energy Infrastructure Business Group. The panelists addressed the challenges companies face when integrating AI into manufacturing and building environments, emphasizing issues such as aligning AI with existing systems, high costs, and data integration. They highlighted AI's role in enhancing sustainability and energy efficiency in buildings and factories by optimizing resource management and reducing waste through AI-enabled features. The discussion also focused on AI-powered spaces' ability to adapt to users' needs while underscoring the importance of privacy and security, stressing the need for robust data protection and transparent policies.

Additionally, Delta showcased the following products and solutions at the summit:

The Delta Future Industry Summit 2024 has once again taken a leading role in establishing a collaborative platform for industry leaders and policymakers, inspiring innovative ideas that contribute to a sustainable and prosperous future for Southeast Asia. Aligned with its mission "To provide innovative, clean, and energy-efficient solutions for a better tomorrow," Delta continues to push the boundaries of technology and sustainability, promoting collaborations that empower industries and communities to thrive in this era of AI-driven transformation.

About Delta Electronics (Thailand) Public Company Limited

Founded in 1988, Delta Electronics (Thailand) PCL. is a producer of power and thermal management products and solutions. The company is a subsidiary of Delta Electronics, Inc. with the mission statement, "To provide innovative, clean and energy-efficient solutions for a better tomorrow," which reflects the company's strong belief in sustainable development especially with issues related to the environment.

As an energy-saving solutions provider with core competencies in power electronics and innovative research and development, Delta's business categories include Power Electronics, Automation, Infrastructure and Mobility. The company's global presence is supported by its sales offices in key regions around the world; manufacturing facilities in India, Slovakia and Thailand; and several R&D centers located in Thailand, India, Germany and other countries.

Delta continues to earn numerous recognitions for its achievements in the region and domestically. Some awards won include the prestigious ASEAN Business Award, Stock Exchange of Thailand's Best Company Performance Award and the coveted Prime Minister's Best Industry Award.

For detailed information about Delta Thailand, please visit: http://www.deltathailand.com/

** The press release content is from PR Newswire. Bastille Post is not involved in its creation. **

Delta Future Industry Summit 2024 Leads the Charge in Unlocking AI's Potential for Southeast Asia's Development