IBM Research

Welcome back to another week of Circuit Breaker. 👋 In this edition, we’re zooming out and drilling down: AI models learning to reason better, quantum‑centric computing taking shape with UIUC, Q4Bio finalists putting quantum to work in biology, and infrastructure updates making enterprise AI more usable at scale. Let’s break it down ↓

We’re seeing a move toward AI becoming more usable, more accountable, and more enterprise-ready. ⚡️ New ways of thinking about AI are emerging as we see how it’s being designed through the collaboration between IBM Research and ETH Zurich, how it’s being documented through the idea of an AI bill of materials, and how it’s being applied to complex, real-world data with Granite time series models. Get into the full breakdown in this week’s Circuit Breaker ↓

IBM 🤝 ETH Zürich. See what’s ahead as part of this 10-year collaboration redefining how algorithms power AI and quantum. 👇 🔹 New methods for solving problems in optimization and differential equations. 🔹 Innovations in linear algebra and Hamiltonian simulations. 🔹 New algorithmic foundations for breakthroughs across AI and quantum computing. Hear what the Director of IBM Research Zurich Alessandro Curioni has to say about the collaboration and what lies ahead: https://ibm.co/6048Eyx7u

🚀 Excited to share that Granite 4.0 3B Vision is now live! A compact vision-language model built for enterprise document understanding, with a focus on what actually matters in production: extracting structured data from complex visual documents — tables, charts, and key-value pairs. Despite its size, it delivers excelent performance across extraction tasks. 💡 What we’re particularly excited about: * Modular by design - Delivered as a LoRA adapter on top of Granite 4.0 Micro, enabling a single deployment to handle both multimodal and text-only workloads seamlessly. * Deep visual reasoning - A DeepStack-style architecture that injects both high-level semantics and fine-grained spatial details — critical when layout matters as much as content. * ChartNet dataset - A million-scale dataset for chart understanding, enabling the model to move beyond description to true structured reasoning. 🧩 Where it fits Designed to plug directly into real pipelines — either as a standalone extraction model or as part of a full document understanding stack with #Docling . Think: invoices, reports, forms, scientific documents — turning messy visuals into structured, usable data. Huge credit to the team at #IBMResearch (#IBMResearchIsrael and our collaborators at MIT-IBM). Rogerio Feris, Artem Spector, Avihu Dekel, Ben Wiesel, Dhiraj Joshi, Hang H., Isaac Sanchez, Jovana Kondić, Moshe Kimhi, Nimrod Shabtay, Pengyuan Li, Roei Herzig, Shafiq Abedin, Shaked Perek, Sivan Harary, Madison Lee, Abraham Daniels, Kate Soule, Udi Barzelay, Peter W. J. Staar, Aya Soffer, Shila Ofek-Koifman, Tal Drory, Luis Lastras, David Cox 👉 Available now on Hugging Face (Apache 2.0). Would love to see what you build with it. https://lnkd.in/dyswimUe #AI #MultimodalAI #VisionLanguageModels #DocumentAI #IBM

This week felt like a turning point 🚀 Quantum simulations are aligning with real lab data, AI is capturing patient notes even in noisy mid‑flight conditions, momentum is building around standardizing how we scale LLMs, and a clear takeaway from All Things AI is emerging: smaller models are having a moment and orchestration is quickly becoming the name of the game. Catch up on everything in this week’s Circuit Breaker ↓

Standard AI models struggle in loud, real-world environments. IBM Granite Speech thrives in them. Tested on medical flights with Australia’s Royal Flying Doctor Service, the model accurately transcribed clinical notes over heavy engine noise without any noise-canceling technology. The 2B Granite-Speech model even ran effortlessly on standard local hardware, outperforming major competitors in a truly challenging acoustic space. Discover how Granite is helping transform medical care in the skies: https://ibm.co/6047Ey3rz

Big news: IBM Research and partners have donated llm-d to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), bringing a Kubernetes-native, high-performance distributed LLM inference framework into the open for the entire community. It’s built to scale, built to adapt, and built for real production use. 🎉 See how we’re advancing AI through open standards, not silos: https://ibm.co/6047Ey3HX

The story of quantum right now isn’t just progress, it’s momentum. From honoring the breakthroughs that made the field possible to opening up access for what comes next, the path forward is getting clearer. Explore what’s shaping the next era of computing in this week's Circuit Breaker ↓

In two different quantum-safe collaborations, IBM is working with secure messaging apps Signal and Threema to explore how their services can remain protected in a future with powerful quantum computers. Across these research projects, teams are designing cryptographic protocols to withstand future quantum risks, applying existing post-quantum cryptography standards and rethinking how messaging systems protect conversations, group membership, and other sensitive metadata. Learn how these collaborations are shaping the future of quantum-safe messaging: https://ibm.co/6049EHoQf

I’m thrilled to congratulate Charles H. Bennett on being named a recipient of the 2025 ACM A.M. Turing Award, computing’s highest honor: https://lnkd.in/gpWpnQpD Charlie’s pioneering work, alongside Gilles Brassard, laid the scientific foundations of quantum information science and shaped the way the world understands computation and information itself. His visionary ideas sparked entire fields and continue to guide the work we do at IBM today. This year’s award is especially meaningful: it marks the first time the Turing Award has recognized achievements in quantum information science. Charlie’s five decades of groundbreaking contributions helped transform quantum mechanics from theory into one of the most important technological frontiers of our time. Personally, one of the moments that set me on this path was reading “Teleporting an unknown quantum state via dual classical and Einstein–Podolsky–Rosen channels” (https://lnkd.in/gUT-iRQP) during my undergraduate studies. That paper fundamentally changed how I thought about information and physics, and ultimately inspired me to dedicate my research to quantum information science. It is a powerful reminder of how deeply Charlie’s work has influenced not just a field, but generations of researchers. All of us at IBM are proud to celebrate Charlie’s extraordinary impact and lasting legacy.