IBM doubles down on open source AI with new Granite 3.0 models

Open source and AI have an uneasy relationship. AI can't exist without open source, but few companies want to open source their AI programs or large language models (LLM). Except, notably, for IBM, which previously open-sourced its Granite models. Now, Big Blue is doubling down on its open-source AI with the release of its latest Granite AI 3.0 models under the Apache 2.0 license.   

IBM has done this using pretraining data from publicly available datasets, such as GitHub Code Clean, Starcoder data, public code repositories, and GitHub issues. And IBM has gone to great lengths to avoid potential copyright or legal problems. 

Also: Can AI even be open-source? It's complicated

Why have other major AI companies not done this? One big reason is that their datasets are filled with copyrighted or other intellectual property-protected data. If they open their data, they also ...