IBM has been a landmark name in artificial intelligence across multiple eras. Its history page on Deep Blue describes how, in 1997, the system “became the first computer system to defeat a reigning world chess champion in a match under standard tournament controls,” beating Garry Kasparov 3.5-2.5 in a New York rematch after losing their 1996 encounter. IBM notes that the work fed later machines such as Blue Gene and Watson, the question-answering system that famously competed on Jeopardy! in 2011.
In the current generation, IBM’s AI strategy centers on enterprise foundation models delivered through its watsonx platform. In its September 28, 2023 announcement, IBM declared “the general availability of the first models in the watsonx Granite model series,” a collection of generative AI models for business, and said standard IBM intellectual-property protections would apply to IBM-developed watsonx models.
IBM has continued to advance the line. Its IBM Research blog describes the “Granite 4.1 family of models,” covering small language models plus speech, vision, embeddings, and Guardian models, “all released under an Apache 2.0 license,” reinforcing IBM’s emphasis on open and transparent models trained on business-relevant data.
Why business readers should care: IBM positions itself as the enterprise-trustworthy AI vendor, emphasizing open licensing, IP indemnification, and models curated for business use - a different bet than the consumer-facing frontier labs.