Posted inNews

IBM launches $500M fund to develop generative AI for enterprise

November 7, 2023No Comments


IBM announced the launch of a $500 million enterprise AI venture fund on Nov. 7 that the company says will be in focus on “accelerating generative AI technology and research for the enterprise.”

Generative AI products for the consumer market, such as OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Bard, have dominated the news airwaves in 2023.

IBM primarily focuses on enterprise-grade solutions for its generative AI products, such as its Watson X platform and numerous cloud offerings.

According to Rob Thomas, senior vice president at IBM, generative AI technologies will be a driving force for productivity and profitability over the next decade:

“AI is projected to unlock nearly $16 trillion in productivity by 2030. With the launch of the IBM Enterprise AI Venture Fund, we are opening another channel to harness the enormous potential of the AI ​​revolution into tangible, positive results for IBM and the companies. what we invest in.”

Details remain scarce on how exactly IBM intends to invest its new $500 million AI Venture Fund. According to a post on the company's blog, the fund will primarily focus on generative AI technology and will be used "to invest in a variety of AI companies, from early-stage startups to hyper-growth startups."

This fund follows IBM's example stake in a $235 million Series D funding round in August for generative AI company Hugging Face, a company known for its extensive libraries of transformers — building blocks of technology for pre-trained generative transformer (GPT) AI models.

Related: Biden's AI executive order 'certainly challenging' for open source AI: industry experts

With the recent slate of investments, including participation in the series A round of machine learning security platform Hidden Layer, IBM continues its current trend of investing in AI startups while actively supporting the development of platforms, models and open source protocols.

"With hundreds of open models at the heart of Hugging Face, they are significantly driving the open source ecosystem," Hugging Face co-founder and CEO Clem Delangue said in an IBM press release. "This is why we wanted them to join our Series D round," he continued, adding, "I'm convinced they will be able to accelerate their impact in AI with the IBM Enterprise AI Venture Fund."