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 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.