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Is this just a harness or using a proprietary model in the background? Anthropic and OpenAI are already very well trained in IBM system i and z knowledge. Unless Bob is somehow improving the integration to these midrange and mainframe systems I literally dont see any benefit to using Bob. IBM will just kill this proprietary tech in 5 years as they are currently doing with RDi or forget about updating it like SEU.

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I think it's just a harness that uses proprietary (or maybe IBM is hosting open weight?) models. They say on the site (in the FAQs) that you can't even choose which model!

So it seems to be a harness that auto-routes your queries with no way to change this.

You are correct. It routes to the model best suited for the ask.

The only positive versus others is that at an enterprise level you have more control of the costs with the coins.

except they tack on surcharges to all token calls to Claude and GPT

IBM has models trained for older mainframe usage (RPG II, RPG/400, COBOL, etc) so I imagine it would be very good for that. Bob looks like a branded fork of vs code or vscodium.

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