IBM open-sources its Granite AI models - and they mean business
Open-sourcing large language models (LLMs) isn't easy. Just ask the Open Source Initiative (OSI), which has been working on an AI-compatible open-source definition for nearly two years. Some companies -- Meta, for example -- claim to have open-sourced their LLMs. (They haven't.) But, now IBM has gone ahead and done it.
IBM managed the open sourcing of Granite code by using pretraining data from publicly available datasets, such as GitHub Code Clean, Starcoder data, public code repositories, and GitHub issues. In short, IBM has gone to great lengths to avoid copyright or legal issues. The Granite Code Base models are trained on 3- to 4-terabyte tokens of code data and natural language code-related datasets.
All these models are licensed under the Apache 2.0 license for research and commercial use. It's that last word -- commercial -- that stopped the other major LLMs from being open-sourced. No one else wanted to share their LLM goodies.
