IBM CEO says open weight models are now irresistibly good and cheap on-prem

IBM CEO Arvind Krishna announced that open weight AI models have become compelling for enterprise on-premises use, now delivering 90% of the performance of frontier models at just 10% of the cost. He noted that the performance gap between open and closed models has narrowed significantly since 2024, making open models attractive for most business tasks like email summarization and contract review. IBM expects this trend to drive strong demand for on-premises AI infrastructure and software solutions to help enterprises deploy these systems.