{
  "id": 16006037,
  "title": "IBM CEO says open weight models are now irresistibly good and cheap on-prem",
  "url": "https://urgent.news/2026/10/22/ibm-ceo-says-open-weight-models-are-now-irresistibly-good-and-cheap-16006037",
  "topic": "tech",
  "section": "Tech",
  "published": "2026-10-22T04:26:39.000Z",
  "source": {
    "name": "The Register",
    "slug": "the-register",
    "url": "https://www.theregister.com/systems/2026/10/22/ibm-ceo-says-open-weight-models-are-now-irresistibly-good-and-cheap-on-prem/5304640"
  },
  "original_language": "en",
  "account": "IBM CEO Arvind Krishna has expressed that open weight models present a cost-effective and highly efficient solution for on-prem enterprise AI use. During IBM's Q3 earnings call, Krishna pointed out that while closed frontier models typically outperform open alternatives, the gap is narrowing. By late 2025, open weight models could be 90% as effective as the best models at just 25% to 10% of their token cost. This cost advantage, coupled with the 90% effectiveness, presents an attractive proposition for enterprises. In response to this, Krishna anticipates increasing demand for IBM's on-prem AI infrastructure. However, he highlighted the challenges businesses face in deploying such infrastructure, mainly due to the need for specialized kernel engineers, network specialists, and skilled personnel to manage model clustering, caching, and response times. Krishna also noted that IBM will develop software to facilitate AI deployments. Furthermore, he predicts a potential sales boost for IBM's Spyre mainframe accelerator cards due to surging demand for on-prem AI. Despite IBM's mainframe revenue declining by 20%, the tech giant's infrastructure revenue grew by 5% to $3.7 billion. Meanwhile, software revenue increased by 9% to $7.8 billion, with Red Hat leading the growth. Overall, IBM's revenue for the quarter was $17.1 billion, marking a 5% increase. However, the stock price saw a minor dip in after-hours trading. Additionally, IBM is currently dealing with a severity one incident in its cloud service, which left users unable to provision new resources or virtual private clouds for 90 minutes.",
  "summary": "90 percent of the performance at ten percent of the price, in just two or three racks, is hard to beat",
  "key_points": [],
  "editors_take": null,
  "illustration": null,
  "coverage": {
    "outlets": 1,
    "also_reported_by": []
  },
  "ai_generated": true,
  "disclaimer": "Summaries, key points and the editor’s take are written by software from other outlets’ reporting and may contain errors — always check the linked original."
}