International Business Machines Corporation, known as IBM and nicknamed "Big Blue," is incorporated in the state of Delaware, USA, with its headquarters in Armonk, New York. Founded in 1911 as the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company and renamed IBM in 1924, it is one of the world's oldest technology corporations and the largest industrial research organization, with 19 research centers in dozens of countries. Among them, the Thomas J. Watson Research Center remains the core of the company's scientific innovation.
Historically, IBM became famous for manufacturing mainframes. However, over the decades, IBM has achieved groundbreaking breakthroughs, including in the field of AI: in 1997, the Deep Blue supercomputer, developed by IBM, defeated world chess champion Garry Kasparov. In 2011, the Watson AI triumphantly beat the champions of the game show Jeopardy!. IBM researchers have received six Nobel Prizes and six Turing Awards. The company held the record for the number of U.S. patents granted annually from 1993 to 2021.
Currently, in the field of AI, IBM is actively developing the open Granite family and related research directions, focusing on data transparency, architectural efficiency, and product readiness for enterprise deployment. The Granite model family is a series of decoder-only language models, first introduced in September 2023. Granite represents a comprehensive approach to enterprise AI, encompassing language models, multimodal variants, as well as models for coding, time series analysis, geospatial data, embeddings, and security.
IBM became the first major open-source AI model developer to receive accredited ISO/IEC 42001:2023 certification for the AI Management System of its Granite family. Also, IBM was one of the first to implement a hybrid attention architecture in Granite 4.0: a combination of Mamba-2 and Transformer, which reduces memory requirements by more than 70% while maintaining quality. Another unique feature that distinguishes Granite from its competitors is that all models are trained on carefully curated data with full disclosure of sources and legal basis for use in LLM training.
Thus, IBM stands out in the global AI industry due to its principled approach to data transparency, the openness and enterprise focus of its solutions, and, in a way, its boldness in research and the implementation of innovations.