IBM applauds the EU Parliament's decision to adopt the EU AI Act, a significant milestone in establishing responsible AI regulation in the European Union. The EU AI Act provides a much-needed framework for ensuring transparency, accountability, and human oversight in developing and deploying AI technologies. While important work must be done to ensure the Act is successfully implemented, IBM believes the regulation will foster trust and confidence in AI systems while promoting innovation and competitiveness.

"I commend the EU for its leadership in passing comprehensive, smart AI legislation. The risk-based approach aligns with IBM's commitment to ethical AI practices and will contribute to building open and trustworthy AI ecosystems," said Christina Montgomery, Vice President and Chief Privacy & Trust Officer at IBM. "IBM stands ready to lend our technology and expertise - including our watsonx.governance product - to help our clients and other stakeholders comply with the EU AI Act and upcoming legislation worldwide so we can all unlock the incredible potential of responsible AI." For more information, visit watsonx.governance and ibm.com/consulting/ai-governance.

IBM has announced the official opening of the new IBM X-Force Cyber Range in Washington, DC. The range includes new custom training exercises specifically designed to help U.S. federal agencies, their suppliers and critical infrastructure organizations more effectively respond to persistent and disruptive cyberattacks, and threats posed by AI. The state-of-the-art facility is designed to help everyone from legal and mission-critical leaders, to the C-Suite and technical security leaders prepare for a real-world cyber incident. According to IBM's 2023 Cost of a Data Breach report the global average cost of a data breach reached $4.45 million, with the US facing the highest breach costs across all regions. Organizations that formed an incident response (IR) team and tested their IR plan experienced faster incident response times and lower costs than organizations that did neither. In fact, the report found that high levels of IR planning and testing saved industry and government nearly $1.5 million in breach costs and 54 days from the data breach lifecycle.

"From national security threats to supply chain disruptions impacting the goods and services we rely on every day, cyberattacks on government and critical infrastructure can have ramifications that go far beyond the balance sheet," said Alice Fakir, Partner, Lead of Cybersecurity Services, US Federal Market for IBM Consulting. "The elite and highly customizable cyber response training we provide at our new DC range helps organizations and federal agencies better defend against existing and emerging threats, and also addresses federal mandates like those in the Biden Administration's Executive Order 14028 focused on improving the nation's cybersecurity."

IBM announced the availability of the popular open-source Mixtral-8x7B large language model (LLM), developed by Mistral AI, on its watsonx AI and data platform, as it continues to expand capabilities to help clients innovate with IBM's own foundation models and those from a range of open-source providers. IBM offers an optimized version of Mixtral-8x7B that, in internal testing, was able to increase throughput—or the amount of data that can be processed in a given time period—by 50 percent when compared to the regular model. This could potentially cut latency by 35-75 percent, depending on batch size—speeding time to insights. This is achieved through a process called quantization, which reduces model size and memory requirements for LLMs and, in turn, can speed up processing to help lower costs and energy consumption.

The addition of Mixtral-8x7B expands IBM's open, multi-model strategy to meet clients where they are and give them choice and flexibility to scale enterprise AI solutions across their businesses. Through decades-long AI research and development, open collaboration with Meta and Hugging Face, and partnerships with model leaders, IBM is expanding its watsonx.ai model catalog and bringing in new capabilities, languages, and modalities. IBM's enterprise-ready foundation model choices and its watsonx AI and data platform can empower clients to use generative AI to gain new insights and efficiencies, and create new business models based on principles of trust. IBM enables clients to select the right model for the right use cases and price-performance goals for targeted business domains like finance.

Cyberattacks are an existential risk, with 89% of organizations ranking ransomware as one of the top five threats to their viability, according to a November 2023 report from TechTarget's Enterprise Strategy Group, a leading analyst firm. And this is just one of many risks to corporate data—insider threats, data exfiltration, hardware failures, and natural disasters also pose significant danger. Moreover, as the just-released 2024 IBM X-Force Threat Intelligence Index states, as the generative AI market becomes more established, it could trigger the maturity of AI as an attack surface, mobilizing even further investment in new tools from cybercriminals. The report notes that enterprises should also recognize that their existing underlying infrastructure is a gateway to their AI models that doesn't require novel tactics from attackers to target.

To help clients counter these threats with earlier and more accurate detection, we're announcing new AI-enhanced versions of the IBM FlashCore Module technology available inside new IBM Storage FlashSystem products and a new version of IBM Storage Defender software to help organizations improve their ability to detect and respond to ransomware and other cyberattacks that threaten their data. The newly available fourth generation of FlashCore Module (FCM) technology enables artificial intelligence capabilities within the IBM Storage FlashSystem family. FCM works with Storage Defender to provide end-to-end data resilience across primary and secondary workloads with AI-powered sensors designed for earlier notification of cyber threats to help enterprises recover faster.

IBM has announced IBM LinuxONE 4 Express, extending the latest performance, security and AI capabilities of LinuxONE to small and medium sized businesses and within new data center environments. The pre-configured rack mount system is designed to offer cost savings and to remove client guess work when spinning up workloads quickly and getting started with the platform to address new and traditional use cases such as digital assets, medical imaging with AI, and workload consolidation.

Building an integrated hybrid cloud strategy for today and years to come
As businesses move their products and services online quickly, oftentimes, they are left with a hybrid cloud environment created by default, with siloed stacks that are not conducive to alignment across businesses or the introduction of AI. In a recent IBM IBV survey, 84% of executives asked acknowledged their enterprise struggles in eliminating silo-to-silo handoffs. And 78% of responding executives said that an inadequate operating model impedes successful adoption of their multicloud platform. With the pressure to accelerate and scale the impact of data and AI across the enterprise - and improve business outcomes - another approach that organizations can take is to more carefully identify which workloads should be on-premises vs in the cloud.

It's been one year since IBM integrated Red Hat storage product roadmaps and teams into IBM Storage. In that time, organizations have been faced with unprecedented data challenges to scale AI due to the rapid growth of data in more locations and formats, but with poorer quality. Helping clients combat this problem has meant modernizing their infrastructure with cutting-edge solutions as a part of their digital transformations. Largely, this involves delivering consistent application and data storage across on-premises and cloud environments. Also, crucially, this includes helping clients adopt cloud-native architectures to realize the benefits of public cloud like cost, speed, and elasticity. Formerly Red Hat Ceph—now IBM Storage Ceph—a state-of-the-art open-source software-defined storage platform, is a keystone in this effort.

Software-defined storage (SDS) has emerged as a transformative force when it comes to data management, offering a host of advantages over traditional legacy storage arrays including extreme flexibility and scalability that are well-suited to handle modern uses cases like generative AI. With IBM Storage Ceph, storage resources are abstracted from the underlying hardware, allowing for dynamic allocation and efficient utilization of data storage. This flexibility not only simplifies management but also enhances agility in adapting to evolving business needs and scaling compute and capacity as new workloads are introduced. This self-healing and self-managing platform is designed to deliver unified file, block, and object storage services at scale on industry standard hardware. Unified storage helps provide clients a bridge from legacy applications running on independent file or block storage to a common platform that includes those and object storage in a single appliance.

IBM has announced (on January 29) that Korea Quantum Computing (KQC) has engaged IBM to offer IBM's most advanced AI software and infrastructure, as well as quantum computing services. KQC's ecosystem of users will have access to IBM's full stack solution for AI, including watsonx, an AI and data platform to train, tune and deploy advanced AI models and software for enterprises. KQC is also expanding its quantum computing collaboration with IBM. Having operated as an IBM Quantum Innovation Center since 2022, KQC will continue to offer access to IBM's global fleet of utility-scale quantum systems over the cloud. Additionally, IBM and KQC plan to deploy an IBM Quantum System Two on-site at KQC in Busan, South Korea by 2028.

"We are excited to work with KQC to deploy AI and quantum systems to drive innovation across Korean industries. With this engagement, KQC clients will have the ability to train, fine-tune, and deploy advanced AI models, using IBM watsonx and advanced AI infrastructure. Additionally, by having the opportunity to access IBM quantum systems over the cloud, today—and a next-generation quantum system in the coming years—KQC members will be able to combine the power of AI and quantum to develop new applications to address their industries' toughest problems," said Darío Gil, IBM Senior Vice President and Director of Research. This collaboration includes an investment in infrastructure to support the development and deployment of generative AI. Plans for the AI-optimized infrastructure includes advanced GPUs and IBM's Artificial Intelligence Unit (AIU), managed with Red Hat OpenShift to provide a cloud-native environment. Together, the GPU system and AIU combination is being engineered to offer members state-of-the-art hardware to power AI research and business opportunities.

IBM, at the 2023 IEEE International Electron Device Meeting (IEDM), demonstrated a concept nanosheet transistor that posts a near 100% performance improvement at the boiling point of nitrogen, of 77 Kelvin (-196 °C). Given how relatively industrialized and scaled out the manufacture, safe transport, storage, and use of liquid nitrogen is, this development potentially unlocks a new class of chips that attain top performance under liquid nitrogen cooling. Think a new generation of AI HPC accelerators that can instantly double their performance under LN2, provided a new kind of cooling solution is developed for data-centers.

Nanosheet transistors are the evolutionary next step to FinFETs, which have been driving semiconductor foundries since 16 nm, which could see their technical limits met at 3 nm. Nanosheets are expected to make their debut with 2 nm-class nodes such as the TSMC N2 and Intel 20A. At an operating temperature of 77 K, IBM's nanosheet device is claimed to offer a near doubling in performance, due to less charge carrier scattering, which results in lower power. Reducing scattering reduces resistance in the wires, letting electrons move through the device more quickly. Combined with lower power, devices can drive a higher current at a given voltage. Cooling also results in greater sensitivity between the device's on and off positions, so it takes lesser power to switch between the two states, resulting in lower power. This lower power means that transistor widths can be lowered, resulting in higher transistor densities, or smaller chips. As of now IBM is wrestling with a technical challenge concerning the transistor's threshold voltage, a voltage which is needed to create a conducting channel between the source and the drain.

The 62nd edition of the TOP500 reveals that the Frontier system retains its top spot and is still the only exascale machine on the list. However, five new or upgraded systems have shaken up the Top 10.

Housed at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in Tennessee, USA, Frontier leads the pack with an HPL score of 1.194 EFlop/s - unchanged from the June 2023 list. Frontier utilizes AMD EPYC 64C 2GHz processors and is based on the latest HPE Cray EX235a architecture. The system has a total of 8,699,904 combined CPU and GPU cores. Additionally, Frontier has an impressive power efficiency rating of 52.59 GFlops/watt and relies on HPE's Slingshot 11 network for data transfer.

Today, IBM introduced the new IBM Storage Scale System 6000, a cloud-scale global data platform designed to meet today's data intensive and AI workload demands, and the latest offering in the IBM Storage for Data and AI portfolio.

For the seventh consecutive year and counting, IBM is a 2022 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Distributed File Systems and Object Storage Leader, recognized for its vision and execution. The new IBM Storage Scale System 6000 seeks to build on IBM's leadership position with an enhanced high performance parallel file system designed for data intensive use-cases. It provides up to 7M IOPs and up to 256 GB/s throughput for read only workloads per system in a 4U (four rack units) footprint.

The Platform for Digital and Quantum Innovation of Quebec (PINQ²), a non-profit organization (NPO) founded by the Ministry of Economy, Innovation and Energy of Quebec (MEIE - ministère de l'Économie, de l'Innovation et de l'Énergie du Québec) and the Université de Sherbrooke, along with IBM, are proud to announce the historic inauguration of an IBM Quantum System One at IBM Bromont. This event marks a major turning point in the field of information technology and all sectors of innovation in Quebec, making PINQ² the sole administrator to inaugurate and operate an IBM Quantum System One in Canada. To date, this is one of the most advanced quantum computers in IBM's global fleet of quantum computers.

This new quantum computer in Quebec reinforces Quebec's and Canada's position as a force in the rapidly advancing field of quantum computing, opening new prospects for the technological future of the province and the country. Access to this technology is a considerable asset not only for the ecosystem of DistriQ, the quantum innovation zone for Quebec, but also for the Technum Québec innovation zone, the new "Energy Transition Valley" innovation zone and other strategic sectors for Quebec.

It's an exciting time in AI for business. As we apply the technology more widely across areas ranging from customer service to HR to code modernization, artificial intelligence (AI) is helping increasing numbers of us work smarter, not harder. And as we are just at the start of the AI for business revolution, the potential for improving productivity and creativity is vast. But AI today is an incredibly dynamic field, and AI platforms must reflect that dynamism, incorporating the latest advances to meet the demands of today and tomorrow. This is why we at IBM continue to add powerful new capabilities to IBM watsonx, our data and AI platform for business.

We have announced our latest addition: a new family of IBM-built foundation models which will be available in watsonx.ai, our studio for generative AI, foundation models and machine learning. Collectively named "Granite," these multi-size foundation models apply generative AI to both language and code. And just as granite is a strong, multipurpose material with many uses in construction and manufacturing, so we at IBM believe these Granite models will deliver enduring value to your business. But now let's take a look under the hood and explain a little about how we built them, and how they will help you take AI to the next level in your business.

IBM has announced the expansion of the their Cloud Security and Compliance Center, a suite of modernized cloud security and compliance solutions designed to help enterprises mitigate risk and protect data across their hybrid, multicloud environments and workloads. As clients look for ways to address new threats across the supply chain and manage evolving global regulations, the solution suite helps to support their resiliency, performance, security, and compliance needs while helping to minimize operational costs.

"IBM Cloud has a long history of working with clients in financial services and other highly regulated industries, especially when it comes to helping them to drive innovation while protecting their sensitive data," said Rohit Badlaney, General Manager, IBM Cloud Product and Industry Platform. "The expansion of the IBM Cloud Security and Compliance Center demonstrates our continued focus on industry-specific capabilities that help address real world business challenges for our clients. For example, clients have the ability to utilize the IBM Cloud Framework for Financial Services, which can help them address evolving rules, laws and regulations surrounding cloud risk. The new capabilities showcase our commitment to supporting clients on their hybrid cloud modernization journeys, designed for security, compliance, privacy, and trust at the forefront of our product roadmap."

IBM has formally introduced watsonx, the company's next generation enterprise-focused artificial intelligence and data platform. Global business leaders remain unclear about the real, transformative power of AI and how to leverage it. The campaign is designed to define and differentiate watsonx as a force multiplier that can accelerate impact for global business leaders as they look to apply AI solutions in new and innovative ways.

The two distinct spots feature a fast-paced, multi-media technique that aims to provide inspiration and guidance around the value proposition of watsonx, while underscoring the need to identify the right AI that will empower businesses to advance objectives and accelerate workloads. These concepts come to life through potential use cases that spotlight the importance of applying AI that is trusted, targeted, and built on the best open technology available.

FUJIFILM Corporation (President and CEO, Representative Director: Teiichi Goto) and IBM today announced the development of a 50 TB native tape storage system, featuring the world's highest native data tape cartridge capacity. Fujifilm has commenced production of a high-density tape cartridge for use with IBM's newest enterprise tape drive, the TS1170. The sixth-generation IBM 3592 JF tape cartridge incorporates a newly developed technology featuring fine hybrid magnetic particles to enable higher data storage capacity.

Innovations in achieving 50 TB Native Capacity
Fujifilm has succeeded in achieving this innovative cartridge capacity by evolving the technologies developed in previous tape generations. This involved enhancing both the areal recording density (the amount of data that can be recorded per square inch) and the overall recording area (the surface area capable of recording data).

IBM has launched a new tool to help enterprises track greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions across cloud services and advance their sustainability performance throughout their hybrid, multicloud journeys. Now generally available, the IBM Cloud Carbon Calculator - an AI-informed dashboard - can help clients access emissions data across a variety of IBM Cloud workloads such as AI, high performance computing (HPC) and financial services.

Across industries, enterprises are embracing modernization by leveraging hybrid cloud and AI to digitally transform with resiliency, performance, security, and compliance at the forefront, all while remaining focused on delivering value and driving more sustainable business practices. According to a recent study by IBM, 42% of CEOs surveyed pinpoint environmental sustainability as their top challenge over the next three years. At the same time, the study reports that CEOs are facing pressure to adopt generative AI while also weighing the data management needs to make AI successful. The increase in data processing required for AI workloads can present new challenges for organizations that are looking to reduce their GHG emissions. With more than 43% of CEOs surveyed already using generative AI to inform strategic decisions, organizations should prepare to balance executing high performance workloads with sustainability.

IBM today announced that it has received an additional Trusted Supplier accreditation from the Department of Defense (DoD) Defense Microelectronics Activity (DMEA) for delivery of embedded security services customized for a U.S.-based advanced microelectronics manufacturer. IBM Consulting's accredited security services were previously recognized with the prestigious James S. Cogswell Outstanding Industrial Security Achievement Award for overall security program excellence in 2022.

Microelectronics are used in most defense technology platforms—from mobile devices to computers and advanced weapons systems. This makes microelectronics supply chains critical to our national security and economic prosperity. However, they also represent one of the most complex defense-critical supply chains to secure because of their global reach and manufacturing. IBM Consulting's award-winning accredited security services takes this complexity into account, allowing for not only the identification, but also the remediation of microelectronics supply chain vulnerabilities.

Oracle has been part of the Linux community for 25 years. Our goal has remained the same over all those years: help make Linux the best server operating system for everyone, freely available to all, with high-quality, low-cost support provided to those who need it. Our Linux engineering team makes significant contributions to the kernel, file systems, and tools. We push all that work back to mainline so that every Linux distribution can include it. We are proud those contributions are part of the reason Linux is now so very capable, benefiting not just Oracle customers, but all users.

In 2006, we launched what is now called Oracle Linux, a RHEL compatible distribution and support offering that is used widely, and powers Oracle's engineered systems and our cloud infrastructure. We chose to be RHEL compatible because we did not want to fragment the Linux community. Our effort to remain compatible has been enormously successful. In all the years since launch, we have had almost no compatibility bugs filed. Customers and ISVs can switch to Oracle Linux from RHEL without modifying their applications, and we certify Oracle software products on RHEL even though they are built and tested on Oracle Linux only, never on RHEL.

Today, it was announced that Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute will become the first university in the world to house an IBM Quantum System One. The IBM quantum computer, intended to be operational by January of 2024, will serve as the foundation of a new IBM Quantum Computational Center in partnership with Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI). By partnering, RPI's vision is to greatly enhance the educational experiences and research capabilities of students and researchers at RPI and other institutions, propel the Capital Region into a top location for talent, and accelerate New York's growth as a technology epicenter.

RPI's advance into research of applications for quantum computing will represent a more than $150 million investment once fully realized, aided by philanthropic support from Curtis R. Priem '82, vice chair of RPI's Board of Trustees. The new quantum computer will be part of RPI's new Curtis Priem Quantum Constellation, a faculty endowed center for collaborative research, which will prioritize the hiring of additional faculty leaders who will leverage the quantum computing system.

A new global study by the IBM Institute for Business Value found that nearly half of CEOs surveyed identify productivity as their highest business priority—up from sixth place in 2022. They recognize technology modernization is key to achieving their productivity goals, ranking it as second highest priority. Yet, CEOs can face key barriers as they race to modernize and adopt new technologies like generative AI.

The annual CEO study, CEO decision-making in the age of AI, Act with intention, found three-quarters of CEO respondents believe that competitive advantage will depend on who has the most advanced generative AI. However, executives are also weighing potential risks or barriers of the technology such as bias, ethics and security. More than half (57%) of CEOs surveyed are concerned about data security and 48% worry about bias or data accuracy.

For weeks, researchers at IBM Quantum and UC Berkeley were taking turns running increasingly complex physical simulations. Youngseok Kim and Andrew Eddins, scientists with IBM Quantum, would test them on the 127-qubit IBM Quantum Eagle processor. UC Berkeley's Sajant Anand would attempt the same calculation using state-of-the-art classical approximation methods on supercomputers located at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab and Purdue University. They'd check each method against an exact brute-force classical calculation.

Eagle returned accurate answers every time. And watching how both computational paradigms performed as the simulations grew increasingly complex made both teams feel confident the quantum computer was still returning answers more accurate than the classical approximation methods, even in the regime beyond the capabilities of the brute force methods. "The level of agreement between the quantum and classical computations on such large problems was pretty surprising to me personally," said Eddins. "Hopefully it's impressive to everyone."

Increasing its HPL score from 1.02 Eflop/s in November 2022 to an impressive 1.194 Eflop/s on this list, Frontier was able to improve upon its score after a stagnation between June 2022 and November 2022. Considering exascale was only a goal to aspire to just a few years ago, a roughly 17% increase here is an enormous success. Additionally, Frontier earned a score of 9.95 Eflop/s on the HLP-MxP benchmark, which measures performance for mixed-precision calculation. This is also an increase over the 7.94 EFlop/s that the system achieved on the previous list and nearly 10 times more powerful than the machine's HPL score. Frontier is based on the HPE Cray EX235a architecture and utilizes AMD EPYC 64C 2 GHz processors. It also has 8,699,904 cores and an incredible energy efficiency rating of 52.59 Gflops/watt. It also relies on gigabit ethernet for data transfer.

In its recent Second Quarter of the Fiscal Year 2023 conference, Synopsys issued interesting information about the recent moves of chip developers and their usage of artificial intelligence. As the call notes, over 200+ chips have been taped out using Synopsys DSO.ai place-and-route (PnR) tool, making it a successful commercially proven AI chip design tool. The DSO.ai uses AI to optimize the placement and routing of the chip's transistors so that the layout is compact and efficient with regard to the strict timing constraints of the modern chip. According to Aart J. de Geus, CEO of Synopsys, "By the end of 2022, adoption, including 9 of the top 10 semiconductor vendors have moved forward at great speed with 100 AI-driven commercial tape-outs. Today, the tally is well over 200 and continues to increase at a very fast clip as the industry broadly adopts AI for design from Synopsys."

This is an interesting fact that means that customers are seeing the benefits of AI-assisted tools like DSO.ai. However, the company is not stopping there, and a whole suite of tools is getting an AI makeover. "We unveiled the industry's first full-stack AI-driven EDA suite, sydnopsys.ai," noted the CEO, adding that "Specifically, in parallel to second-generation advances in DSO.ai we announced VSO.ai, which stands for verification space optimization; and TSO.ai, test space optimization. In addition, we are extending AI across the design stack to include analog design and manufacturing." Synopsys' partners in this include NVIDIA, TSMC, MediaTek, Renesas, and IBM Research, all of which used AI-assisted tools for chip design efforts. A much wider range of industry players is expected to adopt these tools as chip design costs continue to soar as we scale the nodes down. With future 3 nm GPU costing an estimated $1.5 billion, 40% of that will account for software, and Synopsys plans to take a cut in that percentage.

Nintendo hardware enthusiasts have been scouring the internet for more than two decades in search of special prototype Nintendo GameCube consoles - the Space World 2000 expo model has long been sought after by hardcore collectors. Nintendo revealed (at the time) its upcoming home console as well as the Game Boy Advance handheld system at their annual video game trade show held near Tokyo, or the company's hometown of Kyoto, Japan. Space World 2000 (Makuhari Messe, Chiba) would end up being the penultimate show, with Nintendo choosing to not continue with their regular consumer event post-2001.

Consolevariations, a gaming hardware database, this week reported via a blog post that an interesting GameCube prototype was up for sale, following a tip received on Discord, and it quickly became apparent that this slightly bashed and chipped example was indeed one of the very first models revealed to the public at Nintendo's Space World 2000 expo. Several preview units were also demoed on the showroom floor at the August 2001 event, but experts think that these were sourced from the previous year's batch.

With the rise of generative artificial intelligence (AI) and other AI tools, the new models pose a threat to workers around the globe. Today, as reported by Bloomberg News, we find out that International Business Machines, or IBM shortly, is planning to replace thousands of jobs using automation and AI technology. As the report suggests, IBM's Chief Executive Officer Arvind Krishna is expecting to pause the hiring for roles AI could replace in the coming years. The main department that will see a job cut is the non-customer-facing roles like the back office. There are 26,000 people at IBM working in the back office, and CEO noted that "I could easily see 30% of that getting replaced by AI and automation over a five-year period."

This translates to roughly 7,800 jobs impacted by AI over the next five years. The CEO also added that departments such as human resources would see a hiring slowdown or even suspension of hiring further. IBM has 260,000 employees, and the company continues to look for engineering and customer-facing roles.