According to Cointelegraph, IBM has announced the launch of a $500 million Enterprise AI Venture Fund on November 7, aimed at 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 in 2023. IBM, however, is primarily focused on enterprise-level solutions for its generative AI products, including its Watson X platform and numerous cloud offerings.
Rob Thomas, a senior vice president at IBM, believes generative AI technologies will be a driving force for productivity and profitability throughout the next decade, with AI expected to unlock nearly $16 trillion in productivity by 2030. The fund will primarily focus on generative AI tech and will be used to invest in a range of AI companies, from early-stage to hyper-growth startups. This follows IBM’s participation in a $235 million series D funding round in August for generative AI firm Hugging Face, a company known for its extensive transformer libraries, which are foundational pieces of technology for generative pretrained transformer (GPT) AI models.
IBM continues its ongoing trend of investing in enterprise AI startups while actively supporting the development of open-source platforms, models, and protocols. Hugging Face co-founder and CEO, Clem Delangue, expressed his enthusiasm for IBM's involvement in their series D round, stating that he is convinced IBM will be able to accelerate their impact on AI with the IBM Enterprise AI Venture Fund.
