In a significant move, IBM has released its latest Granite AI 3.0 models under the Apache 2.0 license, making them freely available for both research and commercial use. This marks a departure from other major AI companies, which often restrict their large language models (LLMs) with commercial limitations.

The Granite models, designed for business use cases, were trained on publicly available datasets and are specifically tailored for programming and software development. The new models boast greater modeling flexibility, support for external variables, and rolling forecasts. They come in Instruct and Guardian variants, which enable learning and risk detection, respectively.

This open-source approach is significant, as it lowers barriers to entry for AI development and use. IBM believes that by making the models freely available, developers and researchers can quickly build upon and improve them, delivering performance comparable to larger and more expensive models.