IBM

IBM is one of the oldest names in computing, and for most of its life it sold mainframes and consulting rather than consumer products. In the AI era it has taken a deliberately different route from the big labs: instead of chasing the largest, smartest model, it publishes smaller open models that companies can download and run on their own machines, and it sells the platform and services around them.

That is why IBM shows up in our coverage more often than its consumer profile would suggest. Its Granite models are free to use commercially, its research blog is unusually detailed about how the models were trained, and its customers are the sort of banks and insurers that will not send their data to someone else’s cloud.