Volkswagen has walked away from talks with Renault to jointly develop an affordable electric version of the Twingo car, Reuters reported Friday, citing sources familiar with the situation, in a setback for the EU carmakers' efforts to fend off Chinese rivals. From the report: The collapse of negotiations could mean the German carmaker may have to go it alone in developing its own affordable electric vehicle (EV). Renault will continue designing its electric Twingo, scheduled to hit the market in 2026. Both had hoped that sharing the work would cut costs that represent a key hurdle for European carmakers in the face of cheaper cars from China.

Volkswagen broke off discussions mainly because Renault had wanted to build the car in one of its plants at a time when VW is seeking to fully utilise its European production network, one of the sources said.

Microsoft plans a major shakeup of its videogame sales strategy by releasing the coming installment of Call of Duty to its subscription service instead of the longtime, lucrative approach of only selling it a la carte. WSJ: The plans, which mark the biggest change to Microsoft's gaming division since it closed the $75 billion takeover of Activision Blizzard, are expected to be announced at the company's annual Xbox showcase next month, according to people familiar with the matter. Call of Duty is one of the most successful entertainment properties ever, generating over $30 billion in lifetime revenue. Activision, which makes it, has long released new editions annually, selling about 25 million copies on average, selling for around $70 each in recent years.

Before the Microsoft deal last year, Activision was reluctant to fully embrace subscription-based models for a game that still attracts a premium price. Microsoft's subscription service, Game Pass, costs $9.99 to $16.99 a month, and provides access to hundreds of games from Microsoft and dozens of other companies.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Techdirt, written by Mike Masnick: If you're a fan of chaos, well, the TikTok ban situation is providing plenty of chaos to follow. Ever since the US government made it clear it was seriously going to move forward with the obviously unconstitutional and counterproductive plan to force ByteDance to divest from TikTok or have the app effectively banned from the U.S., various rich people have been stepping up with promises to buy the app. There was former Trump Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin with plans to buy it. Then there was "mean TV investor, who wants you to forget his sketchy history" Kevin O'Leary with his own TikTok buyout plans. I'm sure there have been other rich dudes as well, though strikingly few stories of actual companies interested in purchasing TikTok.

But now there's another billionaire to add to the pile: billionaire real estate/property mogul Frank McCourt (who has had some scandals in his own history) has had an interesting second act over the last few years as a big believer in decentralized social media. He created and funded Project Liberty, which has become deeply involved in a number of efforts to create infrastructure for decentralized social media, including its own Decentralized Social Networking Protocol (DSTP).

Over the past few years, I've had a few conversations with people involved in Project Liberty and related projects. Their hearts are in the right place in wanting to rethink the internet in a manner that empowers users over big companies, even if I don't always agree with their approach (he also frequently seems to surround himself with all sorts of tech haters, who have somewhat unrealistic visions of the world). Either way, McCourt and Project Liberty have now announced a plan to bid on TikTok. They plan to merge it into his decentralization plans. "Frank McCourt, Founder of Project Liberty and Executive Chairman of McCourt Global, today announced that Project Liberty is organizing a bid to acquire the popular social media platform TikTok in the U.S., with the goal of placing people and data empowerment at the center of the platform's design and purpose," reads a press release from Project Liberty.

"Working in consultation with Guggenheim Securities, the investment banking and capital markets business of Guggenheim Partners, and Kirkland & Ellis, one of the world's largest law firms, as well as world-renowned technologists, academics, community leaders, parents and engaged citizens, this bid for TikTok offers an innovative, alternative vision for the platform's infrastructure -- one that allows people to reclaim agency over their digital identities and data by proposing to migrate the platform to a new digital open-source protocol. In launching the bid, McCourt and his partners are seizing this opportunity to return control and value back into the hands of individuals and provide Americans with a meaningful voice, choice, and stake in the future of the web."

Palo Alto Networks is acquiring IBM's QRadar cloud software and migrating customers to its Cortex Xsiam platform as part of a broader partnership aimed at expanding its consulting capabilities and customer base. The sum of the deal was not disclosed. CNBC reports: The move normally takes one to three months, Nikesh Arora, Palo Alto's CEO, told CNBC. Also, IBM will train more than 1,000 of its consulting employees on Palo Alto's products. [...] For IBM, a more robust lineup of contemporary security tools for consulting might help the company deliver on its stated goal of revenue growth in the mid-single digits for 2024. In the first quarter, revenue increased 3%, with a 2% bump in the consulting segment.

Palo Alto is growing much faster than IBM. In the January quarter, revenue jumped 19%. The company will report results for the latest quarter on Monday. Palo Alto more than doubled in value last year and its stock is up 6% year to date, lifting the company's market cap past $100 billion. The stock rose more than 1% in extended trading. IBM is up close to 5% this year and is now valued at $154 billion. The companies said the transaction should close by the end of September, subject to regulatory approval and other conditions. [...] IBM will continue to sell its QRadar software for use in on-premises data centers. At the same time, IBM will suggest that clients using it consider switching to Palo Alto's Cortex Xsiam.

Russia is increasingly seeking to encourage and direct hackers to attack British and other western targets, the director of GCHQ has said in her first keynote speech as head of the British intelligence agency. From a report: Anne Keast-Butler said her agency was "increasingly concerned about growing links" between the Russian intelligence services and proxy hacker groups who have long taken advantage of a permissive environment within the country. "Before, Russia simply created the right environments for these groups to operate but now they're nurturing and inspiring these non state cyber actors," she said in a speech to the Cyber UK conference, in what she described as a "globally pervasive" threat.

The spy chief, appointed last year to be the first woman to hold the role, referenced the threat from ransomware -- "the most acute and pervasive cyber threat" -- where cybercriminals, typically from Russia, take control of a company's data and systems and demand significant sums to regain access. GCHQ was "doing everything we can" to counter ransomware actors, Keast-Butler said, degrade their ability to attack systems across government and business and to "produce intelligence that means those involved in ransomware are held to account." There is "no hiding place" for cybercriminals she added.

Japan's Toshiba said on Thursday it will cut up to 4,000 jobs domestically as the industrial conglomerate accelerates restructuring under new ownership. From a report: Toshiba delisted in December due to a $13 billion takeover by a consortium led by private equity firm Japan Industrial Partners, capping a decade of scandal and upheaval. The consortium's efforts to engineer a turnaround at Toshiba are seen as a test for private equity in Japan, which used to be seen as "hagetaka" or vultures due to its rapacious reputation. The restructuring amounts to up to 6% of Toshiba's domestic workforce. The company also said it would relocate office functions from central Tokyo to Kawasaki, west of the capital, and target an operating profit margin of 10% in three years.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Airbus Helicopters showcased an experimental half-plane, half-helicopter on Wednesday in a quest for speed as competition heats up to define the rotorcraft of the future. The $217 million Racer is a one-off demonstrator model combining traditional overhead rotors with two forward-facing propellors in a bid to combine stability and speed, shortening response times for critical missions like search-and-rescue. "There are missions where the quickest possible access to the zone is vital. We often talk about the 'golden hour'," Airbus Helicopters CEO Bruno Even told Reuters, referring to the window considered most critical for providing medical attention. Such designs could also be offered for military developments as NATO conducts a major study into next-generation helicraft, though much depends on how its planners define future needs. [...]

Racer's public debut came months after Italy's Leonardo and U.S. manufacturer Bell agreed to co-operate on the next generation of tilt-rotor technology, which replaces a helicopter's trademark overhead blades altogether. Leonardo is also leading a separate project to develop the next generation of tilt-rotors for civil use. Its AW609 is the sole existing civil design, but has yet to be certified. Proponents of the tilt-rotor, which relies on swiveling side-mounted rotors 90 degrees to go up and then forwards, say it permits higher speed and range that are suited to military missions. Critics say the tilt mechanism reaches higher speeds only at the expense of higher complexity and maintenance costs. Airbus said the Racer will fly at 220 knots (400 km/hour) compared with traditional helicopter speeds closer to 140 knots. Bell says its V-280 Valor tilt-rotor design, recently picked by the Pentagon, will reach a cruise speed of 280 knots. Watch: Racer - Inside the high speed demonstrator (YouTube)

Microsoft's ambitious goal to be carbon negative by 2030 is threatened by its expanding AI operations, which have increased its carbon footprint by 30% since 2020. To meet its targets, Microsoft must quickly adopt green technologies and improve efficiency in its data centers, which are critical for AI but heavily reliant on carbon-intensive resources. Bloomberg reports: Now to meet its goals, the software giant will have to make serious progress very quickly in gaining access to green steel and concrete and less carbon-intensive chips, said Brad Smith, president of Microsoft, in an exclusive interview with Bloomberg Green. "In 2020, we unveiled what we called our carbon moonshot. That was before the explosion in artificial intelligence," he said. "So in many ways the moon is five times as far away as it was in 2020, if you just think of our own forecast for the expansion of AI and its electrical needs." [...]

Despite AI's ravenous energy consumption, this actually contributes little to Microsoft's hike in emissions -- at least on paper. That's because the company says in its sustainability report that it's 100% powered by renewables. Companies use a range of mechanisms to make such claims, which vary widely in terms of credibility. Some firms enter into long-term power purchase agreements (PPAs) with renewable developers, where they shoulder some of a new energy plant's risk and help get new solar and wind farms online. In other cases, companies buy renewable energy credits (RECs) to claim they're using green power, but these inexpensive credits do little to spur new demand for green energy, researchers have consistently found. Microsoft uses a mix of both approaches. On one hand, it's one of the biggest corporate participants in power purchase agreements, according to BloombergNEF, which tracks these deals. But it's also a huge purchaser of RECs, using these instruments to claim about half of its energy use is clean, according to its environmental filings in 2022. By using a large quantity of RECs, Microsoft is essentially masking an even larger growth in emissions. "It is Microsoft's plan to phase out the use of unbundled RECs in future years," a spokesperson for the company said. "We are focused on PPAs as a primary strategy."

So what else can be done? Smith, along with Microsoft's Chief Sustainability Officer Melanie Nakagawa, has laid out clear steps in the sustainability report. High among them is to increase efficiency, which is to use the same amount of energy or computing to do more work. That could help reduce the need for data centers, which will reduce emissions and electricity use. On most things, "our climate goals require that we spend money," said Smith. "But efficiency gains will actually enable us to save money." Microsoft has also been at the forefront of buying sustainable aviation fuels that has helped reduce some of its emissions from business travel. The company also wants to partner with those who will "accelerate breakthroughs" to make greener steel, concrete and fuels. Those technologies are starting to work at a small scale, but remain far from being available in commercial quantities even if expensive. Cheap renewable power has helped make Microsoft's climate journey easier. But the tech giant's electricity consumption last year rivaled that of a small European country -- beating Slovenia easily. Smith said that one of the biggest bottlenecks for it to keep getting access to green power is the lack of transmission lines from where the power is generated to the data centers. That's why Microsoft says it's going to increase lobbying efforts to get governments to speed up building the grid. If Microsoft's emissions remain high going into 2030, Smith said the company may consider bulk purchases of carbon removal credits, even though it's not "the desired course."

"You've got to be willing to invest and pay for it," said Smith. Climate change is "a problem that humanity created and that humanity can solve."

Lauren Forristal writes via TechCrunch: Netflix announced during its Upfronts presentation on Wednesday that it's launching its own advertising technology platform only a year and a half after entering the ads business. This move pits it against other industry heavyweights with ad servers, like Google, Amazon and Comcast. The announcement signifies a significant shake-up in the streaming giant's advertising approach. The company originally partnered with Microsoft to develop its ad tech, letting Netflix enter the ad space quickly and catch up with rivals like Hulu, which has had its own ad server for over a decade.

With the launch of its in-house ad tech, Netflix is poised to take full control of its advertising future. This strategic move will empower the company to create targeted and personalized ad experiences that resonate with its massive user base of 270 million subscribers. [...] Netflix didn't say exactly how its in-house solution will change the way ads are delivered, but it's likely it'll move away from generic advertisements. According to the Financial Times, Netflix wants to experiment with "episodic" campaigns, which involve a series of ads that tell a story rather than delivering repetitive ads. During the presentation, Netflix also noted that it'll expand its buying capabilities this summer, which will now include The Trade Desk, Google's Display & Video 360 and Magnite as partners. Notably, competitor Disney+ also has an advertising agreement with The Trade Desk. Netflix also touted the success of its ad-supported tier, reporting that 40 million global monthly active users opt for the plan. The ad tier had around 5 million users within six months of launching.

Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes filed two lawsuits Wednesday against the international online retail giant Amazon.com, accusing it of deceptive and unfair business practices. Courthouse News Service: The two lawsuits, filed in state court, say Amazon's Prime cancellation process and the algorithm that decides whether a product is offered through a "buy now" or "add to cart" option violate the Arizona Consumer Fraud Act and the Arizona Uniform State Antitrust Act. Mayes, a Democrat, accuses Amazon of artificially inflating prices and boxing our third-party retailers that rely on the site for business. "Amazon must be held accountable for these violations of our state laws," Mayes said in a statement. "No matter how big and powerful, all businesses must play by the same rules and follow the same laws as everyone else."

With Amazon on its heels, the nation's biggest company by revenue is hunting for ways to continue growing. From a report: For a decade, Walmart has reigned as the nation's biggest company by revenue. Its sales last year added up to $648 billion -- more than $1.2 million a minute. That status comes with benefits. It gives Walmart power in negotiations with product manufacturers and in dealing with government officials over policy issues. It's also a point of pride: Job postings often tout working at the "Fortune 1" company as a perk. Its reign is looking shaky lately [non-paywalled link]. If current sales trends persist, Amazon is likely to overtake Walmart soon. Amazon reported $575 billion in total revenue last year, up 12% from the previous year, compared with Walmart's revenue growth of 6%.

Walmart's behemoth size means that to meet its own sales target of around 4% growth each year, the company has to find an additional $26 billion in sales this year. That's no easy task. About 90% of Americans already shop at the retailer. The pandemic and rising inflation boosted Walmart's revenue by $100 billion since 2019. It faces continued uncertainty in consumer confidence and while it's spending in some areas, it's pulling back in others. Earlier this week, Walmart told workers it would cut hundreds of corporate jobs and ask most remote workers to move to offices. While Amazon's and Walmart's businesses compete head on, there are big differences. Amazon earns much of its profit from non-retail operations such as cloud computing and advertising, while grabbing retail market share with fast shipping. Walmart gets the bulk of its sales and profits from U.S. stores, while growing side businesses like advertising and digital sales.

Walmart executives are most wary of Amazon's ability to keep increasing profits through its non-retail business, while eating more of the retail landscape with ever-faster shipping and a bigger product selection, people familiar with the company said. Internally some executives are highlighting Walmart's role as a good corporate citizen and emphasizing that it's important to be the best at serving customers and workers, not just the biggest, say some of those people. Its scale can also have downsides, say some, like outsize attention on every misstep.

schwit1 shares a report: Fake studies have flooded the publishers of top scientific journals, leading to thousands of retractions and millions of dollars in lost revenue. The biggest hit has come to Wiley, a 217-year-old publisher based in Hoboken, N.J., which Tuesday announced that it was closing 19 journals, some of which were infected by large-scale research fraud. In the past two years, Wiley has retracted more than 11,300 papers that appeared compromised, according to a spokesperson, and closed four journals. It isn't alone: At least two other publishers have retracted hundreds of suspect papers each. Several others have pulled smaller clusters of bad papers.

Although this large-scale fraud represents a small percentage of submissions to journals, it threatens the legitimacy of the nearly $30 billion academic publishing industry and the credibility of science as a whole. The discovery of nearly 900 fraudulent papers in 2022 at IOP Publishing, a physical sciences publisher, was a turning point for the nonprofit. "That really crystallized for us, everybody internally, everybody involved with the business," said Kim Eggleton, head of peer review and research integrity at the publisher. "This is a real threat." The sources of the fake science are "paper mills" -- businesses or individuals that, for a price, will list a scientist as an author of a wholly or partially fabricated paper. The mill then submits the work, generally avoiding the most prestigious journals in favor of publications such as one-off special editions that might not undergo as thorough a review and where they have a better chance of getting bogus work published.

Later this month, Comcast will launch a three-way bundle with Peacock, Netflix and Apple TV+. It will "come at a vastly reduced price to anything in the market today," said. Comcast chief Brian Roberts. Variety reports: The goal is to "add value to consumers" and at the same time "take some of the dollars out of" other companies' streaming businesses, he added, while reinforcing Comcast's broadband service offerings. Comcast's impending launch of the StreamSaver bundle come as other media companies have been assembling similar offerings. [...] Like the other streaming bundling strategies, Comcast's forthcoming Peacock, Netflix and Apple TV+ package is an effort to reduce cancelation rates (aka "churn") and provide a more efficient means of subscriber acquisition -- coming as the traditional cable TV business continues to deteriorate. Last week, Disney and Warner Bros. Discovery announced a three-way bundle comprising of Max, Disney+ and Hulu.

OpenAI's co-founder and Chief Scientist, Ilya Sutskever, is leaving the company to work on "something personally meaningful," wrote CEO Sam Altman in a post on X. "This is very sad to me; Ilya is easily one of the greatest minds of our generation, a guiding light of our field, and a dear friend. [...] I am forever grateful for what he did here and committed to finishing the mission we started together." He will be replaced by OpenAI researcher Jakub Pachocki. Here's Altman's full X post announcing the departure: Ilya and OpenAI are going to part ways. This is very sad to me; Ilya is easily one of the greatest minds of our generation, a guiding light of our field, and a dear friend. His brilliance and vision are well known; his warmth and compassion are less well known but no less important.

OpenAI would not be what it is without him. Although he has something personally meaningful he is going to go work on, I am forever grateful for what he did here and committed to finishing the mission we started together. I am happy that for so long I got to be close to such genuinely remarkable genius, and someone so focused on getting to the best future for humanity.

Jakub is going to be our new Chief Scientist. Jakub is also easily one of the greatest minds of our generation; I am thrilled he is taking the baton here. He has run many of our most important projects, and I am very confident he will lead us to make rapid and safe progress towards our mission of ensuring that AGI benefits everyone. The New York Times notes that Ilya joined three other board members to force out Altman in a chaotic weekend last November. Ultimately, Altman returned as CEO five days later. Ilya said he regretted the move.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Crashing into parked cars, drifting over into oncoming traffic, intruding into construction zones -- all this "unexpected behavior" from Waymo's self-driving vehicles may be violating traffic laws, the US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) said (PDF) Monday. To better understand Waymo's potential safety risks, NHTSA's Office of Defects Investigation (ODI) is now looking into 22 incident reports involving cars equipped with Waymo's fifth-generation automated driving system. Seventeen incidents involved collisions, but none involved injuries.

Some of the reports came directly from Waymo, while others "were identified based on publicly available reports," NHTSA said. The reports document single-party crashes into "stationary and semi-stationary objects such as gates and chains" as well as instances in which Waymo cars "appeared to disobey traffic safety control devices." The ODI plans to compare notes between incidents to decide if Waymo cars pose a safety risk or require updates to prevent malfunctioning. There is already evidence from the ODI's initial evaluation showing that Waymo's automated driving systems (ADS) were either "engaged throughout the incident" or abruptly "disengaged in the moments just before an incident occurred," NHTSA said. The probe is the first step before NHTSA can issue a potential recall, Reuters reported. A Waymo spokesperson said the company currently serves "over 50,000 weekly trips for our riders in some of the most challenging and complex environments." When a collision occurs, Waymo reviews each case and continually updates the ADS software to enhance performance.

"We are proud of our performance and safety record over tens of millions of autonomous miles driven, as well as our demonstrated commitment to safety transparency," Waymo's spokesperson said, confirming that Waymo would "continue to work" with the ODI to enhance ADS safety.

Marc Whitten, Unity Create's chief product and technology officer, is stepping down on June 1, 2024, following the company's contentious Runtime Fee policy. Whitten will assist with the transition until December 31, 2024. The now-discarded Runtime Fee, announced in September 2023, faced severe backlash from developers who viewed it as a punitive per-install tariff. Unity reworked the fee and acknowledged its lack of communication with developers. CEO John Riccitiello also departed in October 2023, succeeded by Matthew Bromberg. Upon resignation, Whitten will receive a total of $814,801 in various payouts and benefits.

Meta is shutting down Workplace, the tool it sold to businesses that combined social and productivity features, according to messages to customers obtained by Axios and confirmed by Meta. From the report:Meta has been cutting jobs and winnowing its product line for the last few years while investing billions first in the metaverse and now in AI. Micah Collins, Meta's senior director of product management, sent a message to customers alerting them of the shutdown.

Collins said customers can use Workplace through September 2025, when it will become available only to download or read existing data. The service will shut down completely in 2026. Workplace was formerly Facebook at Work, and launched in its current form in 2016. In 2021 the company reported it had 7 million paid subscribers.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Washington Post: Return-to-office mandates at some of the most powerful tech companies -- Apple, Microsoft and SpaceX -- were followed by a spike in departures among the most senior, tough-to-replace talent, according to a case study published last week by researchers at the University of Chicago and the University of Michigan. Researchers drew on resume data from People Data Labs to understand the impact that forced returns to offices had on employee tenure and the movement of workers between companies. What they found was a strong correlation between the departures of senior-level employees and the implementation of a mandate, suggesting that these policies "had a negative effect on the tenure and seniority of their respective workforce." High-ranking employees stayed several months less than they might have without the mandate, the research suggests -- and in many cases, they went to work for direct competitors.

At Microsoft, the share of senior employees as a portion of the company's overall workforce declined more than five percentage points after the return-to-office mandate took effect, the researchers found. At Apple, the decline was four percentage points, while at SpaceX -- the only company of the three to require workers to be fully in-person -- the share of senior employees dropped 15 percentage points. "We find experienced employees impacted by these policies at major tech companies seek work elsewhere, taking some of the most valuable human capital investments and tools of productivity with them," said Austin Wright, an assistant professor of public policy at the University of Chicago and one of the study's authors. "Business leaders should weigh carefully employee preferences and market opportunities when deciding when, or if, they mandate a return to office." While the corporate culture and return-to-office policies differ "markedly" between the three companies, the similar effects of the RTO mandates suggest that "the effects are driven by common underlying dynamics," wrote the authors of the study.

"Our findings suggest that RTO mandates cost the company more than previously thought," said David Van Dijcke, a researcher at the University of Michigan who worked on the study. "These attrition rates aren't just something that can be managed away."

Robert Ployhart, a professor of business administration and management at the University of South Carolina, said executives haven't provided much evidence that RTO mandates actually benefit their workforces. "The people sitting at the apex may not like the way they feel the organization is being run, but if they're not bringing data to that point of view, it's really hard to argue why people should be coming back to the workplace more frequently," Ployhart said.

Senior employees, he said, are "the caretakers of a company's culture," and having to replace them can have negative effects on team morale and productivity. "By driving those employees away, they've actually enhanced and sped up the very thing they were trying to stop," Ployhart said.

Brandon Vigliarolo reports via The Register: Not everything in the semiconductor industry is about shearing off every last nanometer, which is why the Biden administration is splashing out CHIPS Act funding to those pursuing less cutting edge processor production. Case in point, today's announcement that Bloomington, Minnesota-based Polar Semiconductor could be getting up to $120 million in CHIPS funds to double production capacity over the next two years, along with a possible buyout to return the business to U.S. hands.

Polar, which manufactures semiconductors used primarily for the energy industry and electric vehicles, will use the funds to double its production capacity of sensor and power chips and upgrade its manufacturing kit, as well as adding 160 jobs to boot. Along with expanding production, the U.S. Department of Commerce said the funding would trigger additional private capital investment to "transform Polar from a majority foreign-owned in-house manufacturer to a majority U.S.-owned commercial foundry, expanding opportunities for U.S. chip designers to innovate and produce technologies domestically." In other words - sure it'll expand the output, but the real win is another majority U.S.-owned foundry for the White House to tout.

According to its website, Polar is currently owned by Korean conglomerate SK Group and serves as the primary fab and engineering center for Japanese firm Sanken Electric. Not exactly companies in countries with poor U.S. relations - but overseas owners, nonetheless. "This proposed investment in Polar will crowd in private capital, which will help make Polar a U.S.-based, independent foundry," said U.S. Commerce secretary Gina Raimondo. "They will be able to expand their customer base and create a stable domestic supply of critical chips, made in America's heartland."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: 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.

But, as IBM Research chief scientist Ruchir Puri said, "We are transforming the generative AI landscape for software by releasing the highest performing, cost-efficient code LLMs, empowering the open community to innovate without restrictions." Without restrictions, perhaps, but not without specific applications in mind. The Granite models, as IBM ecosystem general manager Kate Woolley said last year, are not "about trying to be everything to everybody. This is not about writing poems about your dog. This is about curated models that can be tuned and are very targeted for the business use cases we want the enterprise to use. Specifically, they're for programming."

These decoder-only models, trained on code from 116 programming languages, range from 3 to 34 billion parameters. They support many developer uses, from complex application modernization to on-device memory-constrained tasks. IBM has already used these LLMs internally in IBM Watsonx Code Assistant (WCA) products, such as WCA for Ansible Lightspeed for IT Automation and WCA for IBM Z for modernizing COBOL applications. Not everyone can afford Watsonx, but now, anyone can work with the Granite LLMs using IBM and Red Hat's InstructLab.