Granite for developers at the AllThingsOpen.AI conference

On March 17 and 18, the AllThingsOpen.AI conference was held at a historic theater in downtown Durham, North Carolina, near IBM’s RTP campus. The event featured presentations from several IBMers, including a keynote from Sriram Raghavan, Vice President IBM Research AI. This was the first year for the AllThingsOpen.ai event, which was designed to be more hyper-focused than the main AllThingsOpen event, one of the largest open source, technology, web events in the U.S.

The two-day event included a Workshop Day with hands-on workshops, as well as a traditional conference day with sessions spread across three tracks: AI Builders, AI Engineers, and AI Users. (You can read more about these and other personas in the AI ecosystem in this blog post.) Here are some of the highlights from the IBM presenters at the event.

Keynote: Artificial Intelligence needs community intelligence

In his keynote, "Artificial Intelligence needs community intelligence," Sriram discussed the need for technology to be available to everyone and widely deployed in order to see the kind of growth expected. He explained that it’s not just about consuming AI technology, but the community needs to be given the power to create, produce, adapt, shape, and inform it. Be sure to check out this 15 minute presentation for his insights.

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AI Users track: Truly community-based Open Source LLM and what it can do for your business and the open community

In the AI Users track, JJ Ashgar presented "Truly community-based Open Source LLM and what it can do for your business and the open community," giving an overview of open source models, the Model Openness Framework, and how Granite models qualify as open models. For more on JJ’s viewpoint, read his blog post about his experience at this event and be sure to check out the replay.

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Hands-on workshop: Learn how to deploy open source AI models with IBM Granite workshop

In his hands-on workshop, "Learn how to deploy open source AI models with IBM Granite workshop," BJ Hargrave explained how to deploy open source AI models and how Granite’s enterprise-ready models provide flexibility, security, and customization (unlike closed AI systems) with real-world use cases from document summarization and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) to time series forecasting and AI-powered coding.

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Until next time

AllThingsOpen.AI was a dynamic event, and we look forward to future collaborations on building a community around open AI.