IBM CEO says open-weight models now suit cheap on-prem use
Original title: IBM CEO says open weight models are now irresistibly good and cheap on-prem
Krishna told investors open models cost about 10–25% of frontier tokens while scoring near 90% as effective for most tasks.
On IBM’s Q3 earnings call, CEO Arvind Krishna said open-weight models had closed much of the gap with closed frontier models and now make sense for on-prem enterprise AI. He said most tasks, such as summarizing email or reviewing contracts, do not need the higher cost of frontier models, and that useful setups can fit in two or three racks. IBM reported $17.1 billion quarterly revenue, up 5%, while a separate severity-one IBM Cloud incident blocked new Classic Cloud provisioning.
Unconfirmed: IBM has not confirmed whether emergency Classic Cloud maintenance is tied to recently announced critical PHP bugs.
- Krishna said late 2025 scores had moved from about 70 versus 20–30 to 70 versus 50.
- Infrastructure revenue rose 5% to $3.7 billion; software rose 9% to $7.8 billion.
- Red Hat grew 11%, with virtualization deals of $800 million and a $750 million pipeline.
- Mainframe revenue fell 20%; z17 has delivered $1 billion more than any prior model.
- Classic Cloud users were told new provisioning would return by 08:00 UTC Thursday.
From the original article
3 min read at theregister.com
90 percent of the performance at ten percent of the price, in just two or three racks, is hard to beat IBM CEO Arvind Krishna has told investors that open weight models now make brilliant sense for on-prem enterprise use. Speaking on the company’s Q3 earnings call, Krishna said that in 2024 closed frontier models were plainly superior to open alternatives.
By Betelbuddy · theregister.com
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