IBM Granite is ranked world’s most transparent model

Foundation models are everywhere these days, powering AI tools as diverse as chatbots, code assistants, and geospatial models. But as foundation models transform more areas of business and our everyday lives, it’s worth asking: Do we really know how they’re built?

This is the question that guides Stanford University’s Center for Research on Foundation Models, which published its third annual Foundation Model Transparency Index (FMTI) report today. IBM open-sourced its Granite models in 2024, but openness alone doesn’t always equal transparency for developers and end users. The FMTI scores the transparency of popular foundation models according to 100 different indicators, including data sources, risk evaluations, open weights, external reproducibility, incident reporting protocols, and data usage policies. The Stanford team scored models from the major AI companies against their rubrics, giving companies the opportunity to respond to the ratings before the FMTI was…